The Next 100 Years: A New Chapter in India-New Zealand Sport

Six New Zealand delegates. Six Indian counterparts - coaches, athletes, founders and administrators. Four questions, two hours, no media.

A hundred years ago, the Indian Army's hockey team sailed to New Zealand for two months of test matches. One player on that tour, Dhyan Chand, would go on to become India's most decorated Olympian and one of the country's greatest sporting figures.

This year, the Asia New Zealand Foundation marked the centenary by taking its first sports delegation to India. Its final engagement was a closed-door roundtable with Women in Sport India (WISI), where six New Zealand delegates met six Indian counterparts to discuss one question: how do you build women's sport?

WISI was established in 2020 by former female cricketers determined to change India's fragmented, male-dominated sports ecosystem. The organisation works to bridge the gap between grassroots talent and professional sport through leadership programmes, workshops, roundtables and its Tribe app, which helps women navigate careers across the sporting sector.

At the roundtable in May 2026, we were given a copy of Atua Wāhine. Beautifully designed and accompanied by a foreword that lingered long after the visit ended, the book unexpectedly explained why the conversation had felt so easy.

Priyanka and Erin in Mumbai.

From the moment the delegates met, there was an unusual sense of familiarity. The hesitation that often comes with two organisations meeting for the first time disappeared almost immediately. Conversations about governance, leadership and women's sport flowed naturally.

Reading Atua Wāhine, it became clear why.

The book tells the stories of seventeen Māori goddesses, each representing an element of nature or a force of life. Anyone familiar with Indian philosophy immediately recognises the parallel with the many Devis who occupy a similar place in Bhāratiya traditions. Set the two traditions beside one another and something becomes obvious: respect for female strength and leadership was never a modern debate in either culture. It has long been embedded in their stories, values and everyday life.

That discovery mattered.

It meant that when discussions turned to the practical questions of governance, funding, coaching pathways and commercial investment, the delegates were not starting as strangers searching for common ground. They were beginning from a shared understanding that women belonged in leadership. The conversation became less about convincing each other why women mattered in sport, and more about how to build better systems around them.

What New Zealand has built

Sport New Zealand made 40% female representation on every sports board a condition of funding, with a period of three years to transition, or lose the money. The composition of the country's sport boards changed visibly almost overnight.

A standalone Women and Girls Strategy, run out of the then Minister of Sport & Recreation Grant Robinson’s  office, gave the system its own dedicated funding lines. It has since been folded into the wider Sport NZ strategy.

Then came the "Big 4": the International Working Group Conference, the FIFA Women's World Cup, the ICC Cricket World Cup, and the Rugby World Cup - all hosted in New Zealand within three years, and all four led by women CEOs. Women weren't just in the room, they were running the events.

At Hockey New Zealand, a female coaching pipeline was rebuilt deliberately: job descriptions were rewritten with female coaches in the room, roles were advertised where women actually looked for opportunities, and coaches were recruited in pairs rather than alone. The lesson was that inclusion has to start as a leadership choice, not as an operational fix.

What New Zealand learned doesn't work

While the 40% mandate changed who was in the room, it didn't automatically hand them power. Some women found they were still there to satisfy the policy on paper. What actually shifted the dynamic was male allies, like board chairs who used their own platform to bring female members into the conversation, not just fill the seats around the board table.

Broadcast media attention lagged badly behind participation. The Rugby World Cup final sold out, forty thousand people in the stands. A year later, a women's rugby match drew seven thousand. Part of the problem, delegates agreed, is that women's sport is still too often marketed through a male frame: “here's the sport you know, now here are women playing it”.

That framing turns the women's game into a lesser version of the men's - the peak gets built, but the base underneath it doesn't. Underneath all of it sat a familiar reflex: tall-poppy syndrome. New Zealand doesn't always celebrate success well, including its own.

What India brought that New Zealand didn't expect

The Roundtable at WISI.

Delegates discovered that India is more developed and aware than this country on the issue of female athlete physiology. Doctors and sport scientists in the room were comfortable discussing menstrual cycles and female-specific physiology in ways New Zealand is still working toward.

More broadly, many countries haven't seriously engaged with women in sport as a policy question at all. India has.

India also understands the concept of hero worship at scale. Used carelessly, that instinct can distort women's sport. Used deliberately, it can build it - the growth of the Women's Premier League, and the visibility of players like Indian captain Harmanpreet Kaur and VC Smriti Mandhana show what deliberate icon-making can do.

The WPL's growth is now measurable, not just anecdotal. The league launched in 2023 needing to introduce itself to Indian audiences - pre-season ads were built entirely around the word pehchaan, meaning "recognition." By its 2026 season, that need had disappeared. Digital reach rose 17% and overall content consumption jumped 69% compared to 2025, with fans consuming 34.5 billion minutes of WPL content across the season.

Ticketing tells the same story: matches that were free to attend in the league's first season now carry a price tag, and WPL broadcasts are increasingly valued as premium advertising property.

Some of that growth is a spin-off effect from the national team's success. India's Women's World Cup win fed directly into WPL interest, with team sponsorships up 10% and player endorsements up 25% ahead of the 2026 season.

And India also has what delegates called "the Indian way": adapting global models locally rather than importing them wholesale. Women's sport, they agreed, will need the same instinct.

 A pattern bigger than one visit 

The discussion did not exist in isolation.

Only weeks earlier, India and New Zealand had signed a landmark Free Trade Agreement. Alongside provisions on tariffs, investment and market access sat a chapter recognising cultural and traditional knowledge, placing India's Ayush systems and Rongoā Māori alongside one another within the same framework.

It echoed something delegates had already experienced around the table.

Long before governments formalised cooperation, people working in sport had discovered shared values through conversation. The roundtable in Ahmedabad became another expression of the same instinct: relationships first, agreements second.

Where India is still building

In India, sports federation governance is the gate everything else passes through. Cricket shows what's possible on the right side of that gate: the “Board for Control of Cricket in India” (BCCI) runs cricket as a single, corporate-style authority - no rival body contesting its legitimacy, no fight over who gets to design a tournament or select a team.

That stability is what let the BCCI simply decide to launch the WPL in 2023 and back it with real money, real broadcast deals, and a five-year revenue-sharing model for franchises. Three seasons later, the league is the most-watched women's T20 competition in the world, and its stars are household names.

None of that required India to solve women’s participation as an abstract problem - it required one federation with the authority to make a call and the money to fund it.

However, sports in India run politically are a different story. Where two rival federations both claim to be the legitimate national body - as has happened in Indian handball — no one can sanction a tournament, fund a team, or sign a broadcast deal without the decision itself becoming contested. Talent and enthusiasm can't compensate for that; a federation fighting over its own legitimacy can't build anything on top of itself, women's or otherwise.

Cricket's advantage, in other words, wasn't better athletes or a bigger fanbase to begin with. It was a governance structure stable enough to bet on women's cricket in the first place.

Girls' cricket in Amdavad.

But, between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, too many Indian girls drop out of sport altogether. Academic pressure, family scepticism, poor facilities, a weak university sport culture, and discomfort with male coaches at puberty all compound each other. India is good at participation drives. The harder work -identifying talent, resourcing it, and keeping girls in the system through adolescence, is still on-going.

Commercial sport in India is barely twenty years old, and women were long discouraged from playing the sports that now produce its leaders. The thin leadership pool isn't because doors are closed today, it’s more because the pipeline sat empty for decades.

Where they left it

The next steps are practical: a direct partnership between Women in Sport Aotearoa and WISI, university-level sports management exchanges, coaching methodology trades, and story exchanges aimed specifically at male audiences in boardrooms - where delegates felt the conversation most often shifts.

The most useful idea, though, was quieter: a counterpart-to-counterpart relationships rather than one giant alliance. Commercial head to commercial head. Coach to coach. Board member to board member. The two countries' contexts are too different for one large partnership, delegates felt, but similar enough for many smaller ones to work.

Where WISI stands

Two countries, the same problem, working from opposite ends.

New Zealand has built the scaffolding that India is still building - and has learned that scaffolding alone doesn't create real conversation. The work that comes after the mandate turns out to be harder than the mandate itself. India has the cultural moment, the investment, and the willingness to ask the question, while still building the governance, calendars, and pathways girls need to stay in sport past thirteen.

WISI's role isn't to import New Zealand's model wholesale, or to defend Indian sport against justified criticism. It's to carry the conversation carefully - bringing in the methods that transfer, leaving out the ones that don't, and naming what India already does well so it isn't written out of its own progress.

The conversation has begun. Over the coming months, WISI will go deeper on the themes that surfaced in the discussion. If you work in sport and want to follow along, watch this space. (In photo - Delegates at Siddhivinayak Temple in Mumbai - Erin Roxburgh, Kirsten Kilmister & Kirsty Sharp)

 -Asia `Media Centre

The roundtable brought together a diverse group of leaders from New Zealand and India. The New Zealand delegation was led by Kirsty Sharp, Programme Manager, Asia New Zealand Foundation, and included Erin Roxburgh, Deputy Chair, Women in Sport Aotearoa, and Lecturer, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington; Kirsten Kilmister, National Development Manager, Athletics New Zealand; Mark Cameron, Chief Executive, Bowls New Zealand; Simon Brill, General Manager, High Performance, Hockey New Zealand; Steve Johns, Chief Executive, Swimming New Zealand; and Thomas Fox, Head of Commercial Development and Broadcast, New Zealand Cricket.

They were joined by Indian delegates Vaidehi Vaidya, Founder, Women in Sport India; Venika Parikh, National Swimmer; Felcina Miranda, Football Player and Coach, Gujarat State Player; Lavanya Sirsikar, Head of Department and Strength & Conditioning Coach, Vijayi Bharat Academy; Priyanka Dalal, Founder, High 5 Performance; Dhwani Kitchlu, Sports Consultant, former Adani Sportsline; Maana Patel, Olympian and Swimmer; and Nilesh Sadanand, Pavana Group.