PKF aims to bring kabaddi on equal footing for women athletes

The Pakistan Kabaddi Federation (PKF) aims to promote gender equality by forming a national women’s kabaddi team in the Asian style, as the country currently grapples with a lack of sufficient women’s teams.

Bangladesh is set to host the IKF Women’s World Cup (Asian Style) next month, and Pakistan is weighing the possibility of fielding a team in this global event.

“There is a World Cup in Bangladesh next month, and although the time is short, but we are still exploring different options of taking part in the competition", a senior PKF official told Nukta.

“As you know, we don’t have enough women’s teams at the domestic level,” the official was quick to add.

The World Cup is scheduled to take place from November 15–25 at the Shaheed Suhrawardi Indoor Stadium in Dhaka’s Mirpur area. International teams such as Argentina and the Netherlands have also confirmed their participation.

Bridging the inequality gap

Kabaddi in Pakistan remains a male-dominated sport with cultural barriers posing a major challenge to the growth of women’s participation. However, PKF officials believe that building a women’s team is both necessary and timely in line with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Olympic Council of Asia’s (OCA) directives.

“We plan to gather some players and start building a team because it’s now very important,” the official said.

“The Iranian women’s team competes while observing cultural dress codes, and our players can do the same. Hopefully, this will not be a major issue,” the official said.

The official further revealed that Pakistan may invite Iran or Bangladesh for friendly matches in the future to provide local players with valuable exposure.

“Such collaborations could help our women gain experience. But first we need to streamline things at the domestic level to identify and nurture proper talent,” he added.

Scarce opportunities

While Asian-style women’s kabaddi exists in Pakistan, circle-style kabaddi, the traditional format more popular among men, has not been developed for women despite Pakistan’s previous participation in two Women’s World Cups.

“We played in the 2013 and 2014 Women's World Cups under the captaincy of Madeeha,” a former women’s circle-style kabaddi player told this correspondent.

“We were also set to participate in the 2015 edition, but we could not move for that due to strained relations between India and Pakistan and our camp was also called off. Since then, no invitations came and no national women’s circle-style team has been formed,’ the player said.

“After that, I switched to powerlifting because there were no further opportunities in kabaddi. We had the potential to build a strong women’s team, but unfortunately, things did not progress due to various issues,” she said.