India Women Cricket Team: Squad, Rankings, Records & Latest News
Few teams in the women’s game have had a year quite like India Women’s last twelve months. A maiden World Cup title on home soil, a genuinely historic Test win in England, and a painful group-stage exit at the following T20 World Cup — it’s been a stretch that’s swung between the highest highs the program has ever seen and a reminder of how unforgiving the format can be. Here’s the full picture of where India Women stand right now, covering the squad, the leadership, the records, and everything that’s happened along the way.
Leadership and Current Setup
Harmanpreet Kaur continues to lead India across formats, with Smriti Mandhana serving as her deputy — a pairing that’s become one of the most experienced and trusted partnerships in world cricket over the last several years. Amol Muzumdar heads up the coaching staff as head coach, supported by Aavishkar Salvi as bowling coach and Munish Bali overseeing fielding.
That leadership group has faced its share of scrutiny recently. Following India’s early exit at the 2026 T20 World Cup, there’s been growing public conversation about the team’s captaincy structure going forward, with Mandhana herself indicating she’d be open to stepping into a bigger leadership role if required. Nothing formal has changed as things stand, but it’s a storyline worth watching over the coming months as the BCCI reviews the team’s white-ball structure.
A Program Built Over Decades
India Women’s cricket has a longer history than most casual fans realise. The team played its first Test back in 1976 against West Indies in Bangalore, and its first ODI followed two years later against England at Eden Gardens in Kolkata. For decades, the program operated with a fraction of the resources and public attention given to the men’s team, run separately by the Women’s Cricket Association of India until the BCCI took over administration of the women’s game in 2006 — a shift that gradually brought better contracts, more consistent scheduling, and eventually the kind of investment that’s helped produce the current generation of players.
Mithali Raj’s two-decade international career, spanning from the late 1990s into the early 2020s, effectively bridged those two eras — she captained India through some genuinely lean years before handing over a program that was finally starting to receive the structural support it had long been missing.
The launch of the Women’s Premier League in 2023 marked another significant turning point, giving Indian players regular exposure to franchise cricket, higher pay, and direct competition against top international players outside of the usual bilateral and ICC event calendar. It’s difficult to overstate how much that single development has reshaped the pathway from domestic cricket to the senior national team over just a few short years.
Where India Sit in the Rankings
As of the most recent ICC rankings, India sit third in both the Women’s ODI and Women’s T20I team rankings — a position that reflects a side capable of beating anyone on their day, while still sitting just behind the very top tier occupied by Australia and, depending on the week, England or South Africa.
For the exact current standings, our rankings page tracks where India and every other team sit across all three formats, and if you want a deeper breakdown of how the ranking system itself works, we’ve covered that in detail in our guide to women’s cricket rankings and records. Rankings shift weekly, so a team’s exact position can move up or down a spot even without playing a match, simply based on how results elsewhere in the format affect the overall points calculation.
The Historic 2025 World Cup Win
The high point of this era of Indian women’s cricket came on November 2, 2025, when India beat South Africa by 52 runs at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai to win the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup for the first time in the program’s history. It was India’s third appearance in a World Cup final, after painful losses to Australia in 2005 and to England by a single-figure margin in 2017 — both of which had made this title feel overdue by the time it finally arrived.
Shafali Verma was named player of the match in the final, and the tournament as a whole saw India’s all-rounder Deepti Sharma named Player of the Tournament for her contributions across the knockout rounds. A crowd of nearly 40,000 packed into the stadium for the final, a scale of attendance that had historically been associated almost exclusively with the men’s game, and it’s the kind of moment that program administrators point to when discussing the long-term impact of investing seriously in the women’s setup.
A Historic Test Win at Lord’s
If the World Cup was the standout achievement of 2025, mid-2026 produced its own landmark moment. In July 2026, India secured a historic Test win against England at Lord’s — a result that added to a Test résumé that’s been steadily growing since India’s return to more regular red-ball cricket in recent years. India have played 42 Tests in total since their first back in 1976, and while Test matches remain far rarer for women’s teams than white-ball cricket, results like this one carry outsized significance precisely because there are so few opportunities to achieve them.
The T20 World Cup 2026 Disappointment
Not every recent chapter has been a positive one. At the 2026 ICC Women’s T20 World Cup in England, India’s campaign ended in the group stage after a six-wicket defeat to Australia at Lord’s in their final group match — a result that eliminated India from semi-final contention for the second consecutive T20 World Cup. Harmanpreet Kaur produced a defiant response with the bat, smashing the fastest half-century by an Indian in Women’s T20 World Cup history off just 25 balls, including three consecutive sixes in the final over, but it wasn’t enough to overhaul Australia’s chase.
Earlier in that same tournament, India had beaten arch-rivals Pakistan comfortably by 64 runs, with Smriti Mandhana scoring a fifty and Deepti Sharma claiming remarkable figures of 5 for 10 — the best T20I bowling figures by any Indian woman, and a performance that took her past the milestone of becoming the format’s all-time leading wicket-taker. That win over Pakistan extended India’s dominant head-to-head record against their neighbours to 14 wins from 17 T20I meetings.
Australia went on to win the tournament itself, beating hosts England in the final at Lord’s to claim their seventh T20 World Cup title, which puts India’s group-stage exit in some context — they were knocked out by the side that ultimately went unbeaten through the entire competition.
The India-Pakistan Rivalry
No discussion of India Women’s fixtures is complete without addressing the India-Pakistan rivalry specifically, since it consistently draws some of the highest viewership and attention of any fixture on the women’s calendar, regardless of the tournament context. India’s dominance in this particular matchup has been considerable — their win over Pakistan at the 2026 T20 World Cup extended a run that’s seen India win 14 of the last 17 meetings between the two sides in T20Is, with Pakistan’s most recent victory coming back at the 2022 Women’s Asia Cup.
That lopsided head-to-head record hasn’t dampened the intensity around the fixture at all. If anything, the political weight both countries’ fans attach to any India-Pakistan sporting contest means every meeting — regardless of format or the tournament stakes involved — tends to draw crowds and broadcast numbers well beyond what either team’s other group matches would typically generate. It’s a dynamic that mirrors the men’s game closely, and it’s part of why ICC event organisers have generally made a point of scheduling the fixture prominently whenever the two teams are drawn into the same group.
Key Players to Know
Beyond Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana at the top, India’s squad carries genuine depth across departments. Shafali Verma and Jemimah Rodrigues provide firepower through the middle order, Richa Ghosh offers explosive hitting and reliable glovework behind the stumps, and Deepti Sharma has established herself as one of the most complete all-rounders in the world game — a genuine top-order batting option who also happens to be the leading wicket-taker in T20I history. Each of these players has also become a genuine box-office draw in the WPL, which has only added to the depth of coverage and analysis available on their individual games heading into international assignments.
On the bowling side, pacer Renuka Singh leads India’s fast-bowling attack, while a deep spin department built around Deepti Sharma and Radha Yadav gives India options suited to both home conditions and the slower pitches often found at ICC events. Newer names like Shree Charani have also started to force their way into regular selection, a sign of the depth the domestic structure continues to produce, and a reminder that the squad’s success isn’t resting on just two or three individual stars.
How the WPL Has Changed the Talent Pipeline
It’s difficult to talk about India’s current depth of talent without mentioning the Women’s Premier League specifically. Before its launch, promising young Indian players had far fewer opportunities to test themselves against the world’s best outside of a handful of ICC events each year. The WPL changed that almost overnight, giving domestic players regular exposure to international stars, high-pressure knockout cricket, and coaching setups built around the same professional standards seen in the men’s IPL.
Players like Shree Charani and other recent debutants have benefited directly from that pathway, arriving in the senior India setup with far more big-match experience than earlier generations typically had at the same age. It’s part of why India’s bench strength looks considerably deeper now than it did even five years ago, and why selectors have had the confidence to rotate newer faces into senior squads without the team’s overall competitiveness dropping off noticeably.
India’s Broader 2026 Schedule
Beyond the two World Cups, India Women have kept a busy calendar through 2026, including a T20I tour of South Africa in April, where the hosts won the five-match series 4-1 behind a dominant series from South Africa’s Laura Wolvaardt. Results like that are a useful reminder that even a World Cup-winning side has vulnerable stretches, particularly away from home against a well-organised opponent.
For the latest fixtures and results as India’s schedule continues through the rest of the year, ICC’s official India team page is the best primary source for team news, while ESPNcricinfo’s India Women coverage provides detailed match reports and statistics for every fixture. Our own news section covers India’s matches and squad announcements as they happen, alongside coverage of every other major team.
A Program on the Rise, With Work Still to Do
Taken together, the last year captures India Women’s position in the sport pretty accurately: genuinely good enough to win the biggest prize in the format, as the 2025 World Cup proved, but not yet consistent enough to be the clear favourite every time a major tournament rolls around, as the T20 World Cup exit demonstrated just months later. That gap between their ceiling and their floor is exactly what the coaching staff and selectors are working to close, and it’s likely to be the defining storyline for the team heading into the next World Cup cycle.
For a program that didn’t win a global title in nearly five decades of trying before 2025, even a disappointing tournament now gets measured against a genuinely high bar — which is its own kind of progress, however it might feel in the immediate aftermath of a group-stage exit.
Records Held by Indian Players
Several current and former India players sit at or near the top of the sport’s all-time record books, which says a lot about the program’s overall contribution to the women’s game beyond just team results. Mithali Raj holds the record for most international runs by any woman across all formats combined, along with the record for most ODI runs specifically. Jhulan Goswami retired as the leading wicket-taker in women’s international cricket history, having become the first bowler to reach 250 ODI wickets.
Smriti Mandhana is currently tied for the most international centuries by any active or retired batter, and Deepti Sharma’s recent milestone as the all-time leading wicket-taker in T20I cricket adds another name to that list of Indian players who’ve left a lasting mark on the sport’s record books. For a deeper look at how these figures stack up across the wider game, our guide to women’s cricket rankings and records covers the full picture.
That combination of individual greatness and, more recently, genuine team success is part of what makes this current era of Indian women’s cricket feel different from earlier ones — for a long stretch, India produced world-class individual players without the collective results to match, and 2025’s World Cup title finally closed that gap in the most meaningful way possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the captain of the India Women’s cricket team? Harmanpreet Kaur captains India across formats, with Smriti Mandhana serving as vice-captain.
Has India Women ever won the World Cup? Yes — India won their first-ever ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup in 2025, beating South Africa by 52 runs in the final at Navi Mumbai, after finishing runners-up in 2005 and 2017.
How did India Women perform at the 2026 T20 World Cup? India were eliminated in the group stage after losing to Australia by six wickets at Lord’s, missing the semi-finals for the second consecutive T20 World Cup. Australia went on to win the tournament.
Who is India Women’s head coach? Amol Muzumdar is the head coach, with Aavishkar Salvi as bowling coach and Munish Bali as fielding coach.
Where does India rank in ICC Women’s rankings? India are currently ranked third in both the Women’s ODI and Women’s T20I team rankings.
Who is India’s leading wicket-taker in T20I cricket? Deepti Sharma, who became the format’s all-time leading wicket-taker during the 2026 T20 World Cup after a five-wicket haul against Pakistan.
What is India’s head-to-head record against Pakistan in women’s T20Is? India have won 14 of the last 17 T20I meetings against Pakistan, with Pakistan’s most recent win over India coming at the 2022 Women’s Asia Cup.
Has India Women played Test cricket recently? Yes — India secured a historic Test win against England at Lord’s in July 2026, part of a Test résumé that now stands at 42 matches since their debut in 1976.