The ongoing inaugural Women’s T20 World Cup Cricket is underway and marks a historic milestone for women’s sport.
The players have overcome enormous challenges and achieved remarkable feats to reach this stage, demonstrating both skill and resilience on the world stage.
The T20 tournament consists of a six-team event featuring India, Nepal, Pakistan, Lanka, Australia and the US, which started on November 11 in Delhi.
Blind cricket uses a plastic ball with metal bearings that sound, and players are grouped by sight: B1, B2 and B3.
It is necessary to field a team with players from all three vision categories (B1, B2 and B3). B1 hitters use runners for safety, and each run they score counts as two.
However, the Indian team is led by Deepika TC, a native of Karnataka who lost her eyesight as a baby following an incident.
Sharing her experience, she said, “This is the biggest moment of my and my team’s lives. Earlier this month, the sighted Indian women’s cricket team won the World Cup in Navi Mumbai, and we want to make it a double this month.”
On the contrary, another player in the team, Anekha Dev, 20 from Jammu and Kashmir, was partially blind.
Her hard work led her to the national team, and she soon adopted the audible ball system.
One of the intriguing examples is women who have performed diligently, and their tournaments are known for their powerful display of sportsmanship.
The Cricket’s Association for the Blind in India (CABI) was founded in 2011. The proactive process for a women’s team began in 2019, leading to their first international match and a gold medal at the IBSA World Games in Birmingham in 2023.
In this regard, Mahantesh GK, Chairman of CABI said, “We felt we were doing an injustice by not giving visually impaired women the same opportunities as men.”
He believed that setting up such a tournament required tremendous effort and was a crucial challenge in building good teams.
However, he believed that the positive responses would help make the world more inclusive and achieve remarkable things.
The semi-finals and final of the World Cup will be held in Colombo and all matches will be streamed live on CABI’s YouTube channel and the state-run Prasar Bharati platforms.
The final is a historic stage in which the blind women of India are not only chasing a trophy, but also setting an example for other teams and earning respect for disabled athletes.
