The BCCI has appointed three former India women’s internationals, Nooshin Al Khadeer, Sunetra Paranjpe and Vellaswamy Vanitha, as specialist coaches for women’s cricket at its Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru, the first time the board has staffed the facility’s women’s programme with a dedicated all-women coaching trio drawn from the playing ranks it is now developing.
Filling a Structural Gap
The Centre of Excellence has long functioned as the BCCI’s high-performance pipeline for emerging talent, but its coaching bench for the women’s programme had historically been thinner and less specialised than the men’s setup. Al Khadeer, a former India left-arm spinner, Paranjpe, an experienced domestic and India A coach, and Vanitha, a former India batter turned coaching specialist, bring playing pedigree specifically from within the women’s game rather than adapted expertise from the men’s system, a distinction administrators say matters for credibility with young trainees.
Part of a Broader Investment Push
The appointments sit alongside the BCCI’s wider 2026-27 domestic calendar expansion, which the board says will run to 1,788 matches across age groups and formats, including an extensive slate of Senior, Under-23, Under-19 and Under-15 women’s competitions. That volume of cricket only functions if there is coaching depth to match it, and the Centre of Excellence hires are explicitly framed as the personnel side of that structural bet: more matches require more qualified specialist coaches feeding talent upward, not just more fixtures on a calendar.
Why Specialist, Not Generalist, Coaching Matters Here
Cricket administrators who have pushed for these appointments argue that women’s cricket has distinct technical and physical development curves, particularly around bowling workload management and batting technique against different pace profiles, that generalist coaches trained primarily in men’s cricket can overlook. Al Khadeer’s background in spin bowling and Paranjpe’s domestic coaching record give the Centre of Excellence a bench that mirrors, in miniature, the specialist support structures Australia’s domestic system has used for years to produce its deep women’s talent pool.
Not Without Sceptics
Not every observer treats the move as unambiguously significant. Some former players and commentators note that India has made similar symbolic gestures before, including WV Raman’s appointment as head coach of the senior women’s team in 2018 and Amol Muzumdar’s subsequent tenure, without those individual appointments translating into sustained structural change lower down the pyramid. The test, sceptics argue, is not whether three well-regarded former players are hired, but whether their presence changes outcomes for the under-19 and under-23 pipelines feeding the senior team over a multi-year horizon.
The Money Behind the Moment
The coaching appointments follow closely on the BCCI’s December 2025 decision to bring domestic women’s match fees close to parity with the men’s game, with senior one-day and multi-day playing XI members now earning INR 50,000 per day and T20 players earning INR 25,000, more than doubling previous rates. Taken together, the pay hike and the coaching appointments represent the clearest signal yet that the BCCI is treating women’s domestic cricket as infrastructure worth building rather than a line item to be topped up periodically.
What to Watch
The real evidence of impact will show up gradually, in the technical grounding of players emerging from the under-19 and under-23 pathways over the next two to three seasons, and in whether other state associations follow the BCCI’s lead in prioritising specialist women’s coaching at the grassroots level. There is also a symbolic dimension worth noting: Al Khadeer, Paranjpe and Vanitha are all figures who played through eras when Indian women’s cricket received a fraction of the board’s attention and funding, and their elevation to salaried, specialist roles at the BCCI’s flagship high-performance facility is being read within the domestic game as evidence that coaching career pathways for former women internationals, an avenue that until recently was thin and inconsistently supported, are becoming more structurally real. If the Centre of Excellence appointments hold up as more than a headline, expect India’s bench strength in women’s cricket to visibly deepen by the back half of this decade.
There is also a symbolic dimension worth flagging separately from the structural one. Coaching appointments of this kind send a signal to the wider domestic system about what kind of career path is available to women who have played the international game, and administrators say they expect the visibility of Al Khadeer, Paranjpe and Vanitha in these roles to encourage more state associations to create similar specialist posts rather than relying on a single generalist coach to cover an entire women’s programme.