By V Krishnaswamy
Three Indian women golfers at various stages in their careers made 2023 India’s best-ever season on the Ladies European Tour. They won a bunch of titles, registered a bagful of top-10 finishes and two of them, Diksha Dagar and Aditi Ashok, were also in the top-four of the Race to Costa del Sol.
The third, Avani Prashanth, still an amateur, who will figure in LET’s Final Qualifying School, has already signalled her intent by winning once on the LET Access while being an amateur, and made cut in five of her six starts on LET. She was also in the top-10 in two of those LET events at the Magical Kenya Ladies and Hero Women’s Indian Open.
There are almost a dozen Indian women golfers all set for the Final stage of the LET Q-School next month. Indeed, Indian women’s golf run by the Women’s Golf Association of India (WGAI) is looking solid and ready to grow even more.
Women’s golf in India had its first star in the 1990s when Smriti Mehra came up. She played on the LPGA, featured well on the Women’s British Open and even won on the Future’s Tour. Mehra also helped the setting of the women’s pro golf circuit in India, and she played regularly on it to boost it.
For almost 15 years, the Hero Women’s Pro Golf Tour, since inception has been backed by the same sponsors, who have done the Hero Women’s Indian Open since 2010 – the Indian Open itself started in 2007 as an event on the Ladies Asian Golf Tour.
From a mere five to six golfers initially, it now often has 40-odd golfers, and many have gone on to play on the Ladies European Tour and many have eyes on the LPGA.
While Aditi Ashok, Diksha Dagar and more recently Avani Prashanth, who finished fourth in the individual section of World Amateurs Team event and won the Queen Sirikit Cup in Asia, are the prominent names, there are others like Vani Kapoor, Tvesa Malik, Amandeep Drall, Gaurika Bishnoi, Ridhima Dilawari, Neha Tripathi, Sneha Singh, Seher Atwal and others who have the potential to go up further.
But for now, the focus has been on Aditi and Diksha, who had a great 2023. As Aditi won the Andalucía Costa del Sol Open de España, the season-ending title, Diksha won in the Czech Republic in June, finishing tied seventh at the same event. Aditi had also won the season-opener in Kenya and she now has five wins on LET dating back to 2016 and has come close many times on the LPGA.
When the 2023 LET season ended, Diksha Dagar was third on the Order of Merit and Aditi fourth. Never before have two Indians finished in the top four of the LET’s Order of Merit.
Aditi’s best on the Order of Merit was second in 2016, which was also her rookie year. That year she played 13 events and won twice and in 2017, she was seventh despite playing only seven events, as she started playing on the LPGA, too.
This year again she played seven events on LET plus some like Evian, AIG Women’s Open and Scottish Open which were co-sanctioned with the LPGA. Apart from two wins, Aditi also had two other top-10 finishes on the LET.
On the LPGA Aditi had five top-10 finishes including a second-place finish on the JM Eagles Championship. She is still searching for her first win on the LPGA. Her phenomenal showing included India’s first-ever women’s golf medal at the Asian Games, where she was second after looking a lock-in for gold after three rounds.
The year was sensational for Diksha, too. In her career, which started in 2019, Diksha has two wins and 12 top-10 finishes. Of them one win and nine other top-10s came in 2023 alone. She played an incredible 27 events this season, a testimony to her fitness and the ability to take the load.
Aditi finished 41st on the LPGA and co-incidentally ended 2023 with a career-best 41st place on Rolex World Rankings for Women. Aditi, who has won two times, including at the Andalucía Costa del Sol Open de España, has also finished in top-five and top-10 multiple times on either side of the Atlantic. She ended the year in fourth place on the Ladies European Tour and the Ladies PGA in the United States.
Diksha Dagar also moved to 162nd on world rankings – her best was 156 earlier in the year – and was third on the Ladies European Tour’s Race to Costa del Sol.
Between the two, they won three times – Aditi twice and Diksha once. If Aditi started 2023 with a win in Kenya, Diksha maintained it with a win in Czech Republic in the middle of the year in June before Aditi closed it with another win in Spain. The two also collected 11 Top-10s (nine by Diksha and two by Aditi) on the LET.
With a whole lot of other women waiting in the wings to fly to the LET and LPGA, Indian women’s golf is indeed in a good place.
