The Women’s IPL will include five clubs and a maximum of five foreign players in the starting XI in March 2023.

According to BCCI President Sourav Ganguly, the Indian Premier League (IPL) will resume its pre-COVID-19 home-and-away format in the 2023 season.

In a note to state units, Ganguly stated that “the next season of men’s IPL will also return to the home and away format with all ten teams playing their home matches at their designated venues.”

Since the COVID-19 epidemic, only a few locations have hosted IPL events. It was held at three locations in the United Arab Emirates in 2020: Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi. The competition was held in four locations in 2021 as well: Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and Chennai.

The cash-rich league will revert to its previous structure, in which each team plays one home game and one away game, after the pandemic has been contained.

For the first time since 2020, the BCCI is running a full-fledged domestic season, and all multi-day events will also revert to the standard home and away schedule.

The BCCI is also aiming to host the much-anticipated Women’s IPL’s debut season early in 2019.

“The eagerly anticipated Women’s IPL is currently being worked on by the BCCI. We anticipate launching the first season early in 2019 “In the letter dated September 20, Ganguly said.

It is anticipated that the Women’s IPL will improve women’s cricket in India. The BCCI is creating a girls under-15 ODI tournament in addition to the Women’s IPL.

“We are excited to announce a ladies’ U15 One Day event from this season. Worldwide, women’s cricket has grown astronomically, and our national squad has been doing well. Our young ladies will have a route to play at the national and international level thanks to this new competition “Ganguly wrote.

Where are the teams coming from?

The BCCI will sell the five franchises, in contrast to the Women’s T20 Challenge, the forerunner to the WIPL, where the teams were put together at random. However, the BCCI has outlined two possibilities for the WIPL, unlike the men’s IPL, where franchises bid for teams in a certain city. The first one consists of sales teams spread out over six different zones across the nation. Dharamsala/Jammu (North zone), Pune/Rajkot (West), Indore/Nagpur/Raipur (Central), Ranchi/Cuttack (East), Kochi/Visakhapatnam (South), and Guwahati are among the cities in each zone that have been shortlisted (North-East).

The second strategy entails selling teams without providing them with a stable home base and scheduling games at six IPL locations that have been shortlisted: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai.

The WIPL plan will be presented by the BCCI at the AGM the following week, however the IPL Governing Council chairman and BCCI office bearers will jointly make the final decision.

Exponential involvement growth is what led to the creation of WIPL.

Since India made it to the ODI World Cup final at Lord’s in 2017 and lost to England in front of a packed house, women’s cricket in India has become a hot topic. The BCCI introduced the Women’s T20 Challenge in 2018, but it only included one game. It grew to be a three-team competition over the following three years. At the time, the BCCI’s hesitation to start a women’s IPL was criticised by voices from all facets of women’s cricket in India and around the world.

The board and a few state organizations had initial qualms about the small player pool in women’s cricket, but those concerns have since subsided.

“We intend to conduct the Women’s IPL on similar lines with the Indian Premier League,” the BCCI stated in its paper on WIPL. “With the rise in popularity of women’s cricket in the country primarily due to prominent performances by the Indian Senior Cricket team on the world stage by qualifying for the finals in the recently held 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, semi-finals in the 2018 T20 World Cup, and finals in 2020 T20 World Cup.

In the eight years between 2014 and 22 there was “an overall increase of 111% in players’ involvement across various categories,” according to the journal. This suggests a huge victory on the domestic front. A further breakdown revealed that the number rose by 129% for senior women and by 92% for those under the age of 19.

The WIPL and the proposed WPSL, along with the Fair Break Invitational, the Women’s Hundred, the WCPL, and the WBBL, will be T20 leagues that aid in the growth and internationalization of women’s cricket. The WIPL paper also stated that the BCCI had investigated both the WBBL and the Women’s Hundred models before settling on its strategy.