Purse Math and Caddie Wages: The Real Scorecard of the PGTI

The wind changed direction without warning on the ninth green at DLF during Tuesday's practice round. The flag dipped, and the caddie standing at the edge of the green folded his yardage sheet and put it away — that won't help now, the wind is coming off the Aravalli ridge. I first heard that sentence in 2026, in the caddie yard at Delhi Golf Club's Lodhi course, and since then no long-form file of mine has gone to press without at least two caddies speaking in it. The caddie reads the wind before the weather app does, but that reading is paid out of a share of prize money, not a salary.

Near the 18th he pulled a folded slip of paper from his pocket. A standard PGTI event carries a purse of roughly one crore rupees, the winner's share close to 15 lakh. The caddie's custom is 5 to 10 per cent: a week's work with a player who makes the cut is worth 75,000 to 1.5 lakh. A caddie whose player missed the cut got 6,000 to 7,000 for six days, which is day-labour money. At the bottom of the slip he had written it himself: travel mine, stay mine, food mine. That is where the real economy of this sport begins — not at the trophy, at the caddie yard.

In 2026 I spent six weeks in the Lodhi caddie yard. I tracked 22 caddies, interviewed 14, and found that only three had ever entered an IGU junior event. Average monthly income was about 9,000 rupees, while the weekend guest green fee topped 1,500 rupees. A guest paid more for one round than a caddie earned in six weeks of carrying twenty-odd rounds. That fieldwork got me my first PGTI media-centre pass, and it gave me a habit: start every file by asking who in this ecosystem gets paid.

I carried the same notebook to DLF for the 2026 Hero Indian Open. On Sunday, SSP Chawrasia signed for a 68 and won by seven shots at 10-under 278. I filed 14 updates on the live blog that day, ran a 312-member WhatsApp broadcast, and the blog drew 48,000 live views. Everyone wrote the scorecard story; I wrote the sidebar on the DLF caddie yard from my 2026 notes. Then 2026 arrived, the season stopped, the Hero Indian Open was cancelled. Using that same WhatsApp list I surveyed 63 caddies across Delhi Golf Club and DLF — 57 reported lost income, the average monthly loss 18,000 rupees. After a 90-minute Zoom call with PGTI officials and club representatives, a 25-lakh emergency relief pool came together. That pool was not the product of a policy. It was the product of a list, and the list had been filled not by a journalist but by the caddies themselves.

Now do the arithmetic no leaderboard shows. A young professional's year: academy coaching at 8,000 to 12,000 a month, tour entry fees of 5,000 to 8,000 per event, travel and lodging, and a separate fee for the Monday qualifier. The player standing in that qualifier often hands the bag to a friend, because paying a professional caddie for the week is not affordable. This is not a talent question, it is a working-capital question: how many months can a player stay on tour without making a cut? The answer is often eight to ten, and then he takes an assistant's job at a club.

The second half of that arithmetic is the women's circuit. A leg of the Hero Women's Pro Golf Tour carries a purse of roughly 10 to 15 lakh rupees, about a tenth of the men's one crore. And at the Tokyo Olympics in 2026, Aditi Ashok finished fourth at 15-under 269, one stroke out of the bronze-medal play-off — India's best international result of the decade. The biggest result comes from the circuit with the smallest purse. In column inches and prize money alike, the women's tour trails by a factor of ten, while the results run in the opposite direction.

There is a third layer that gets less ink: how the field fills. Sponsor invites and club quotas mean the 60th spot is usually allotted, not earned. This is not a ladder, it is a guest list, and guest lists favour people with a club secretary's number. In 2026 a pro walked away mid-season in front of me for exactly this reason. I keep his account in every piece, because a feature with no documented outsider in it slowly starts agreeing with the people who let the writer in.

The outside read is that Indian golf needs better coaching and better data. The data is fine; a strokes-gained dashboard still cannot price Lodhi's wind, cannot measure the angle that comes through the trees and lives in a caddie's wrist. And when I write the caddie's story the trap is that praise for the craft buries the wage. So I hold the rule hard: every piece of knowledge travels with its price. The wind read is invaluable. The man who gives it earns 9,000 rupees a month.

The next signal is easy to name. Watch whether the coming sponsor renewals add legs to the women's tour or cut them — that will say more about whether Indian golf is funding its results or its habits than any mission statement will. And watch whether that 25-lakh relief pool becomes a standing caddie welfare fund or a memory of one good year. Until then, behind every trophy there is a folded slip of paper in someone's pocket.