By Ila Ananya
We’ve previously wondered about the percentage of sportswomen who’ve won the Arjuna award. Early in May 2016, we found that at its lowest, only 20 percent of the Arjuna awards went to women. The lowest was in 2010, and that’s the percentage around which this tends to hover (at its highest in 2013, it was surprisingly 53.33 percent).
Former captain of India’s women’s football team, Bembem Devi, who we know as the player who made her international debut in 1995 when she was just 15 years old, recently talked about fewer women being given the Arjuna award than men. Devi had applied for the Arjuna award from 2014 to 2016, and for three years in a row, she has been refused. The Sports Ministry, has instead argued that Devi hasn’t represented India at a World Cup or Olympic event — a clause that doesn’t exist in the Ministry’s criteria, and has most certainly not been applied to male footballers.
“Even after 21 years of playing for India, my state refused to acknowledge my performances, and the Ministry says I’m not good enough. My question to them was then why are the men’s footballers getting this benefit, to which they had no reply,” Devi said in an interview.
Comparing Devi’s case to the number of male footballers who’ve been given the Arjuna award, 23 of the 24 footballers have been men. Former Bengal and India captain Shanti Mullick has been the only woman footballer to be given the award, way back in 1983. And while the Indian women’s team is ranked at 54th in the current FIFA rankings, the Indian men’s team is ranked 129th.
“We [women footballers] also win SAFF Championships, South Asian Games. We played in the Asian Games played in the Asian Games, qualifying tournaments of the World Cup, Olympics and AFC Asian Cup and we are even higher than men’s team in FIFA rankings, but why do only men get the Arjuna award and not women footballers?” Devi asks.
Bembem Devi retired from international football last year after she played in 85 international matches over two decades. In February last year, she’d captained the Indian team which won a gold medal in the South Asian Games at Shillong. She’s also won two SAFF championships, and four South Asian Games. Devi was also the first to play in a foreign league, when she was signed on by New Radiant Sports Club of Maldives in 2014.