Navneet Kaur’s father ran a tiny television repair shop in Shahabad Markanda, a small town in Haryana’s Kurukshetra district. He also farmed a small patch of land. Between the two, he found enough money to keep his daughter’s hockey dream alive.
She actually wanted to play cricket. There was no ground for it near her house. But there was a hockey academy right across the street, run by a coach named Baldev Singh. So she picked up a stick instead of a bat, and that decision changed everything.
By 2013, she was in Monchengladbach, Germany, scoring the winning penalty stroke against England to get India a bronze medal at the FIH Junior World Cup. Big moment. But the real turning point for her family came later, when she got a government job as Chief Traveling Ticket Inspector with Western Railway.
Think about that for a second. A woman who has played 211 international matches, scored 70 goals, helped India finish fourth at the Tokyo Olympics and win bronze at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, and her financial security did not come from any of that. It came from a railway job.
This is the real story of Indian women’s hockey. Not the goals. The gap between what these athletes achieve and what they earn from it.
A team full of similar stories
Deepika Sehrawat’s story runs on a similar track. She is from Hisar, and she started out as a wrestler, training alongside her brother. In 2012, on her way to wrestling practice, she picked up a hockey stick just for fun. She never really put it down after that.
She became known nationally after the 2018 Sub-Junior Nationals in Hisar, where she scored 16 goals for Haryana and was named the tournament’s best player. National camp call-up followed almost immediately. Today she has 69 caps, 37 international goals, and gold medals from the 2023 and 2024 Asian Champions Trophy. Her job security comes from Indian Oil Corporation.
Then there is Neha Goyal, who said something on Hockey India’s podcast, ‘Hockey Te Charcha’, that tells you everything about how these careers actually begin. She said she started playing hockey partly because the academy in Sonepat gave free shoes and gear. Her mother worked long hours in a factory. Free shoes meant one less thing to worry about.
Free shoes. That is where some of India’s international hockey players start.
The match that started it all, again
On August 16, 2026, at Wagener Stadium in Amstelveen, Netherlands, India opened their FIH Women’s World Cup campaign against China, the Paris 2024 Olympic silver medallists. Coach Sjoerd Marijne and captain Salima Tete sent the team out with a clear plan.
Eighth minute, Navneet Kaur gets the ball from Neha Goyal inside the circle, turns, and flicks it low into the goal. 1-0. China equalizes through a penalty stroke from Zhang Ying in the 15th minute. Deepika answers back in the 25th minute with a deflected drag flick off a penalty corner. China levels again in the 39th minute through Ma Ning. Final score, 2-2.
Goalkeeper Savita Punia played her 314th international match that day, making the saves that mattered when they mattered. Defender Nikki Pradhan held things together in front of the back three.
A good match. A point earned against a strong side. But here is the uncomfortable business truth sitting right behind that scoreline.
Why cricket eats the whole plate
India’s advertising money overwhelmingly goes to men’s cricket. Everyone knows this. What people underestimate is just how wide the gap gets once you leave cricket altogether, even for a successful female cricketer versus a successful female hockey player.
Take Smriti Mandhana. Kroll valued her personal brand at around $17.6 million in 2024, according to numbers reported by BestMediaInfo. She has multi-year deals with 15 major brands, Hyundai, Red Bull, Nike, Hero MotoCorp, ICICI Bank among them.
Shuttler PV Sindhu charges between Rs 1 crore and Rs 1.25 crore for a single day of endorsement work, with annual deals worth Rs 2 to 3 crore. Weightlifter Mirabai Chanu saw her commercial value jump ten times over, to about Rs 1 crore a year, after her Tokyo silver. Boxer Lovlina Borgohain sits between Rs 70 lakh and Rs 1 crore per deal.
Now look at hockey. A core national player, someone playing regularly for India, might get somewhere between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 20 lakh a year from individual endorsements, if that. Udita Duhan got Rs 32 lakh in the Hockey India League auction. Navneet Kaur got Rs 19 lakh.
These are not personal endorsement figures. These are league salaries, and even those numbers only exist because a private league finally decided to pay them.
Why does this happen? Because brands are not really investing in players in team sports the way they invest in individuals. A cricket board sells rights, a league auctions players every year, television covers every match, and fans follow individual batting averages the way stock traders follow share prices. Hockey has none of that continuity. It has tournaments, then silence.
The government steps in where sponsors don’t
Because private money is thin, state governments and public sector companies fill the gap. And in Haryana, this is not a small gap.
Under Haryana’s Cash Award Scheme, an Olympic gold medalist gets Rs 6 crore. Silver gets Rs 4 crore, bronze gets Rs 2.5 crore, and even just participating earns Rs 15 lakh. For a World Cup win on a four year cycle, it is Rs 1.5 crore for gold. For the biennial World Cup, the number drops to Rs 40 lakh for gold, Rs 30 lakh for silver, Rs 20 lakh for bronze.
In July 2026, as reported by The Tribune, Haryana CM Nayab Singh Saini transferred Rs 20.59 crore to 198 medal winning athletes from the state. Over the last 12 years, Haryana has paid out roughly Rs 730 crore to nearly 17,000 athletes. That is not pocket change. That is a state government effectively running a parallel sports economy because the private market has not shown up.
On top of that, national award winners like Khel Ratna and Arjuna recipients get a monthly honorarium of Rs 20,000. Hockey India pays 40 core men and 40 core women players a monthly allowance of Rs 25,000. The sports ministry’s Target Olympic Podium Scheme covers training gear, elite coaching and foreign exposure trips.
And then there are the jobs. Railways, IOCL, BPCL. These public sector companies hire athletes into fixed salary roles, give them leave for training camps, and eventually a pension. It is not glamorous. It is stability, and for families like Navneet’s, stability was the whole point of playing sport in the first place.
Enter the league, finally
This is where the story starts to shift, slowly.
The Hockey India League came back this year with a standalone women’s competition, four franchises, private owners, and something Indian hockey has never really had before, a player auction.
Shrachi Rarh Bengal Tigers, Delhi SG Pipers, Odisha Warriors, Soorma Hockey Club. Each team works with a salary cap of Rs 2 crore and must build a 24 player squad, 16 Indian, 8 overseas.
At the auction in New Delhi, Udita Duhan became the most expensive Indian player, going to the Bengal Tigers for Rs 32 lakh. Argentine drag flicker Agustina Gorzelany fetched the highest overall price, Rs 42 lakh, also to Bengal Tigers. Dutch star Yibbi Jansen went to Odisha Warriors for Rs 29 lakh.
Domestic talent did well too. Lalremsiami went for Rs 25 lakh, Sunelita Toppo for Rs 24 lakh, Sangita Kumari for Rs 22 lakh. Deepika, Salima Tete, and Savita Punia each fetched Rs 20 lakh. Navneet Kaur went to Delhi SG Pipers for Rs 19 lakh.
Hockey India even lowered the base price to Rs 2 lakh so that developing players would not go unsold. That is how Madhuri Kindo got picked up for Rs 3.4 lakh, Jyoti Chhatri for Rs 5 lakh, Deepika Soreng for Rs 2.2 lakh. Small numbers on paper. Life changing for a young player from a small town who now has a professional contract with her name on it.
For the first time, hockey players in India have something close to a market price. A number that says, this is what a franchise thinks you are worth, independent of any government scheme.
Why brands still hesitate
Even with the league, sports marketing agencies like Baseline Ventures still struggle to sell hockey players the way they sell cricketers. Tuhin Mishra, the managing director there, has spoken about this with LiveMint. His point is simple. Brands want a face. A single face they can put on a billboard and say, this person represents us.
In an individual sport, that is easy. Neeraj Chopra wins, Neeraj Chopra becomes the ad. In hockey, when India draws 2-2 with China, the story becomes about the team, about national pride, not about any one player’s personal brand. Agencies call this the team sport anonymity trap, and it is very real.
There is also a decay problem. Digital engagement and brand interest around hockey players spike hard during a World Cup or Olympics, then fall by 70 to 80 percent within 30 days once the tournament ends. Cricket does not face this because there is always another match, another league, another headline. Hockey goes quiet for months at a stretch.
So agencies have started doing something smarter. Instead of selling “Indian hockey team members”, they sell the person. Navneet’s story from Shahabad. Deepika’s switch from wrestling mat to hockey turf.
Vandana Katariya became a brand ambassador for Uttarakhand’s Department of Women Empowerment and Child Development, a civic role with state honorariums attached, not a corporate deal, but a step in the right direction.
What needs to happen next
A few things could genuinely shift this balance. Raising the HIL salary cap beyond the current Rs 2 crore floor would help, as would expanding the league from four teams to six, opening more contracts for younger players still fighting for a spot.
Digital content is another lever. If players can build personal followings between tournaments, through training videos, personal stories, behind the scenes footage, brands have more reason to stay interested year round instead of just during World Cups.
And brands themselves need to stop treating hockey sponsorship as a CSR box to tick. Nutrition companies, sportswear brands, regional healthcare firms, these are natural fits for athletes who represent grit and discipline. Haryana, Odisha, Punjab, Jharkhand, these are hockey heartlands with real consumer bases waiting to be tapped.
Back to the ticket inspector
Navneet Kaur still works at Railways, technically. She still scores goals for India, still gets flown to Amstelveen to play World Cup hockey against Olympic medalists. Both things are true about the same person at the same time.
That contradiction is really the whole story of Indian women’s hockey right now. A sport good enough to draw with Olympic silver medalists, but not yet valuable enough to make its stars financially independent without a government job backing them up.
The league is new. The auction numbers are still small compared to cricket. But for a girl growing up in Shahabad or Hisar today, watching Navneet score that flick in the eighth minute, there is now, for the first time, a real question worth asking. Maybe she will not need the railway job after all.