The Women’s Premier League - A Paradigm Shift in Indian ‘Women’s Cricket’

Praveen Thariyan — 2025-08-10

The beginning of the Women’s Premier League (WPL), which started its first season in March 2023, is significant for Indian cricket. The WPL is dismantling the social construct of masculinity in cricket, deconstructing a cultural belief that cricket is a men’s game and opening up the game for women in India and beyond. The WPL mirrors the Indian Premier League (IPL), and its creation as a formal league marks a significant step towards increasing visibility, investment, and professionalism for female cricketers. This article charts the development of the WPL and its integration into women’s cricket, with particular reference to the Indian women’s team, specifically their powerful images during the 2017 ICC Women’s World Cup - one of the most defining moments in women’s cricket. Analysis will examine the economic hinterlands and sponsoring landscapes surrounding marketers for leagues of this nature. While observing the behaviors that may promote a commercially viable market with audience absorption, positive advances have been made till now. However, much remains to be done in addressing the infrastructure deficit, the gender disparity in funding, and the inadequate availability of development routes. Future research may want to adopt a longitudinal approach to tracing these pathways, as well as WPL sustainability models, over time and examining the longer-term benefits in support of grassroots development, considering contextual factors pertinent to women’s participation in cricket and the economic sustainability of women’s sport. We recommend that future research adopt a longitudinal approach to better understand the impact of grassroots development interventions on gender equity for women in cricket, the financial sustainability of women’s sport, and increasing levels of participation. It may also be helpful to evaluate the sociocultural barriers faced by female cricket players and identify the policy levers that can inform different approaches to creating an inclusive path for the growth of women’s cricket in India.

Generalizable and Interpretable Deepfake Detection via Multi-Scale vector Transformer Fusion network

K. Thulasimani — 2025-08-10

The rapid progress in deepfake generation poses a threat to information integrity, digital security, and public trust. State-of-the-art detection algorithms tend to rely on low-level convolutional features or training only on the datasets that they are built on; the former limits generalization to the unseen manipulation cases and the latter limits interpretability. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage detection framework that combines Crossover Forex Component Analysis (CFCA) and the Multi-Scale Vector Transformer Fusion Network (MSVTF-Net). As the first algorithm, CFCA extracts the crossover frequency-domain and residual features from manipulated facial regions by factoring video frames into component subspaces, which represent subtle inconsistencies that are invisible to human eyes. The resulted multi-component vectors are then fed as input to MSVTF-Net, which is the second algorithm. MSVTF-Net develops hierarchical transformer-based vector fusion at multiple scales to integrate local and global spatiotemporal cues for robust classification and interpretable attention-based segmentation localization of manipulated regions. The pipeline is tested on the open-access FaceForensics++ dataset and is reproducible and promotes fair benchmarking. Experimental results indicate that CFCA -> MSVTF-Net framework substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in cross-manipulation detection accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, which is a practical development for trustworthy deepfake forensic applications.

Journal of Advanced Research and Innovation

The Women’s Premier League - A Paradigm Shift in Indian ‘Women’s Cricket’

Generalizable and Interpretable Deepfake Detection via Multi-Scale vector Transformer Fusion network