On Monday, BCCI General Manager Ratnakar Shetty said that the Board of Control for Cricket in India has planned a Future Tours Programme for the women cricketers.

According to the reports of PTI, Shetty said, “We are now planning to have an FTP at the international level like the men’s team for ODIs and T20s and that is working out well. Don’t go by the quantity of matches but go by the fact that we will be playing better teams in the next two years and our girls will get a chance to compete at that level.”

During the panel discussion on women’s cricket in Thiruvananthapuram as part of the 40th National Convention of the Sports Journalists’ Federation of India, Shetty added, “Women’s cricket came under BCCI in 2006 and the last 11 years has seen a lot of progress in terms of facilities that are available for girls, even at the state level and the BCCI level. Every country and ICC is first interested in creating a base for women’s cricket for the promotion of the game in all the nations which play cricket.”

Shetty also took the opportunity to accept that the structure of the game in India has been altered. He said, “We have restructured the women’s cricket at the junior level and we will have an U-16 tournament at the zonal level because I can tell you from my experience that it is not easy to get 15 players in every state association. So this year we will have a zonal tournament for U-16. We already have a U-19 tournament and we have U-23 where they play One-day games and this year onwards they will play T20. We have a senior women’s tournament where we have one-day games, three-day games, and T20s.”

Former India women’s skipper, Shubangi Kulkarni, also took part in the discussion.