Blind Women Cricketers: A Different Set of ‘Women In Blue’ Are Scripting Success Stories, One Match At A Time

• When India’s blind women cricketers won the Blind World Cup last year, their triumph didn’t spill into social media timelines

• Many of these players had grown up being told they were a burden or curse, so the win carried a meaning far heavier than a trophy

• When they walked into the field to play the inaugural world cup, they were fighting for recognition in a world that still struggles to see blind women as women, let alone as athletes

The ball announces itself before it arrives. A faint metallic jingle rolls across the ground, low and steady. India’s Simu Das is at the crease. Her head slightly tilted. Listening.

In a country unkind to its women, blind women are taught to withdraw from public space. Her standing at the crease is an act of defiance.

The sounds that Simu follows are precise. The rattle of metal bearings inside a plastic ball, the runner’s footsteps beside her, and the breath she held before the swing.

Simu swings. The bat connects, and the runner takes off for two runs. For a fully blind batter, that counted as four.

While much of the country was still celebrating the rise of the ‘Women in Blue’, another team was winning beyond the spotlight. India’s blind women cricketers defeated Pakistan, and outplayed Nepal to lift the Blind World Cup. Their triumph didn’t spill into prime-time debates or flood social media timelines. But for the women on this field, many of whom had grown up being told they were a burden, curse, or shrap, the win carried a meaning far heavier than a trophy. They were fighting for recognition in a world that still struggles to see blind women as women, let alone as athletes.

The Game You Have To Hear To Believe

The tournament brought together India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia and the United States, in a round-robin format. India’s 16-member squad came from nine states, spanning villages, landless labourer families, and blind schools, and had learned the sport only in the past few years.

To understand the final, one needs to know that blind cricket is not a simple adaptation of the sighted game. Along with rules, it relies on sound, timing, and spatial awareness of players. The game uses a special plastic ball fitted with metal bearings that jingle. It’s for the batter to hear the ball coming. Players are classified as B1, B2 or B3. The teams must include a mix of all three groups. The ball is bowled underarm along the ground. B1 batters run with a runner. And each run counts as two.

Simu does not raise her bat. For her, celebration can wait. Listening always comes first. This win is not just about sport. It’s a public rejection of a society that refuses to see blind girls as worthy of dreams.

Simu Das: A Mother’s Fight, A Daughter’s Stage

What stands out about Simu is not her blindness, but her calm. In the Delhi training camp, she moves with the certainty of someone who has learned to navigate the world by sound and memory. Outside the camp, in the chaos of Delhi traffic and unfamiliar streets, most people might not notice her. But inside the world of blind cricket, she’s an all-rounder, and her story passed between players as proof that survival was possible.

Simu is 23, from Kosari Gao, a small village in Assam. Unable to bear the stigma of having two blind children, her father “ran away” the day she was born. Simu’s elder brother was also born blind. “My mother was a beautiful woman,” says Simu, as if the words are too simple for what she wants to describe.

Beauty to her is her mother’s refusal to abandon her when people told her she was wasting her life, raising children who would never see, earn or marry. “Mother cleaned people’s homes, and took up odd jobs to feed two blind children. She stayed when she could have left,” Simu says. She became Simu’s eyes, her friend and her fiercest defender.

Simu’s father hadn’t left in isolation, but with the village’s permission. Blindness, especially in girls, was seen as misfortune that could stain an entire family. When he remarried and started a “normal” household, no one questioned him. When Simu’s mother stayed, people called her “mad”.

Her father returned once when she was six or seven and he tried to take her away, “perhaps to send me begging”. When her mother fought for her, the village called her mad. That fight, Simu says, gave her strength. “I knew she had faith in me,” she says.

As a child, Simu would sit outside her village school and listen to children studying, and wanted to be part of it. When Sister Elizabeth, a missionary from Guwahati, saw Simu sitting alone counting pebbles, she asked her if she wanted to go to school. “The village got suspicious, saying if I went to school, I will be converted to Christianity. They threatened to not let us stay in the village.” But her mother refused to be intimidated and Simu went to school.

She was among the few in her village to pass class 10. And somewhere along the way, she discovered cricket, a sport that allowed her to participate without being apologetic about her blindness. The same people who once called her mother names, now speak of her with pride.

But the stigma around blindness stays beyond her village. “Even in cities people think we are cursed. This inhuman mindset must change.” She began using a walking stick openly, something she had avoided for years. “I felt ashamed of being seen as blind. But now I carry it like a badge. This is who I am, and I will live my best life,” she says. Simu’s story is not only about sport, but about a mother who fought a village, and a daughter who turned that fight into a national stage.

Deepika TC: The Captain Who Played Against Caste

Captain Deepika TC, 23, moves like someone who has been taught to read the world by touch. She walks with the careful confidence of a leader, the kind that comes from survival, not protection.

Deepika was born in Sathya Sai district of Andhra Pradesh and lost her sight as a baby in an accident. Born into a family of daily wage labourers, a future for a blind daughter was barely imaginable. “Some days we would eat just one meal,” she says, without elaborating.

Cricket entered her life through specialised schools far from her village where teachers encouraged her to try the game. Her initial hesitation to play was because the world had trained her to believe that a blind girl was not meant for sport. Her family was against her playing the game because they barely had shoes to wear, and cricket meant expenses they could not afford.

In the village, children laughed at her, and adults joined in. She was bullied, called names, and repeatedly reminded that her disability was something to be mocked. “Being a girl made it worse, turning my blindness into a double reason for ridicule,” she says.

But she beams as she talks about her friend, a “normal” girl, and the way their friendship crossed a caste barrier that decided who could speak to whom, who could sit where, and who could play together. “My father and the villagers would get angry when I spoke to her or went to her home,” Deepika says. People from Deepika’s caste were not allowed to enter the other girl’s house. Even touching objects from that household was considered polluting.

After Deepika joined the cricket team, she found a family that lived together, trained together, and celebrated together. It was the first time she felt what equality could be like. “I felt we are all the same,” she says. Cricket gave her confidence beyond the village’s rules. After the World Cup win, Deepika returned to her village not as a blind girl, but as a champion. “I had found a voice,” she says.

“I asked my father: If God did not want us to talk to them, why were we all created the same?” Her father understood, and villagers stopped objecting to her friendship.

Patriarchy, Deepika says, is a battle that still needs to be fought. She speaks about a custom in her village where women are forced to stay outside the village and are cut off from their homes during their periods.

She describes days when her mother was sent away. “We would drink water and sleep,” she says, the words heavy with the memory of hunger and humiliation. “That is the real darkness. Not blindness or disability. This is what keeps women trapped,” she says.

During the felicitation after the World Cup, she was asked what she wanted. “I wanted a road for my remote village. And it was sanctioned immediately. The road was not just infrastructure, but a path out of the village’s darkness to education and hope,” she says.

“I realised,” she says, “that I have power. Not because I am a captain. Because I can make the people listen.”

Ganga Madam: Denied A school, Found A Stadium

The Delhi camp is loud when practice sessions are on. The ball jingles, the coaches shout. Players laugh in a way that suggests they have known each other for years. Ganga Kadam sits slightly apart, listening, rather absorbing.

Ganga is 26 and comes from Hingoli district in Maharashtra. She is the only blind child among eight sisters and a younger brother. She says it plainly: “My village prefers boys. My parents kept trying until they had a son.”

The preference for the male child is part of the system that decides a girl’s value at birth. In Ganga’s village, girls are expected to marry early, bear children, and disappear into the household.

The school in her village ended at class 7. For most girls, that is where the story stopped. All her siblings dropped out to join labour work, doing what their parents did. The work that kept the family alive but never allowed anyone to rise, she says.

For Ganga, the situation was worse as being blind made her a “burden” in the eyes of a system that equates disability with uselessness. “I wasn’t even fit to do the manual labour so I would sit in the fields and think about the purpose of my existence,” she says, as she remembers the emptiness.

For her, there was no school, no transport, no support and no one to tell her that her life could be more than labour. But one day, on a bus, when her father saw some blind students travelling on their own, he realised that blind people could move through the world independently, and enrolled Ganga in a blind school in Solapur.

The first days at the boarding school were the hardest as she felt abandoned by her family. Soon she discovered something the village never offered her, a community. At the blind school, she found other girls and boys who were blind, and teachers who believed in them. “It was a place where blindness was not a curse, but a condition that could be worked with and lived with. This was where my story shifted from tragedy to possibility,” she says. 

Ganga went on to complete her Master’s in political science. She became, by her own words, “perhaps the most educated woman in my village”.

Her achievement is not personal. It’s political. It challenges a system that denies education to girls, and especially to disabled girls. It also questions the assumption that a blind woman is a burden, and the preference for male child.

In ‘Team India’, Ganga found a place where her blindness was no a reason to be excluded. “Given an opportunity, we could be stronger in so many other ways.”

Phula Saren: A Tribal Girl Who Refuses To Disappear

Phula Saren meets you with a smile that’s bright and unguarded. She carries herself like someone who has decided not to hide anymore. Not because she is a blind, poor, tribal woman.

Phula is 19, from Baleshwar in Odisha. An all-rounder, she plays cricket with the kind of confidence that shows that she belongs on the field. This ‘belonging’ was something she was never allowed where she comes from.

When she was five, she lost vision in her left eye. Soon after, her mother died, and the household fell on her shoulders. She began raising her three siblings while her father worked as a labourer, trying to keep the family alive.

In her village, she was treated like a problem. “I used to feel like people looked at me and thought, ‘Why is she here?’” she says. “They wouldn’t touch us. They wouldn’t drink water from our hands. They didn’t want to be near us.”

Along with the stigma from blindness, the discrimination was about being tribal too. “Our community is always pushed to the edges. I felt like I was not even a full person.”

For a tribal girl with a disability, the world becomes a constant reminder that she is not supposed to exist loudly. Thus, Phula’s childhood was shaped by this layered humiliation. It was not always violent, but always present.

Then cricket came. A teacher at a school for the blind introduced her to the sport. The first time she heard the jingle ball, she felt she could be part of something without being treated as a “problem”. “It was the first time I didn’t feel like I had to hide.” “It was not about winning,” she says. “It was about being part of a team.”

“Now people say, ‘Phula’s father’ like it’s a proud thing,” she smiles.

“All the girls in my school got married,” she says. “But I am playing. I love this life.” Phula is refusing the system that wants to reduce her to marriage, household and disability. And she is not just winning a World Cup; she is telling the world: “I exist”.

Invisible to Invincible: From Village To The Spotlight

Spending time with the team in Delhi, one notices how their routine is built on mutual support and understanding. In their Jindal House accommodation, blindness is not described, but lived. They move in lines, hands resting lightly on the each other's shoulder, and guiding each other through rooms and corridors.

This atmosphere is practical, not sentimental. They train together in the morning, share meals, and spent evenings sharing jokes. If one of them hesitates, other steps in.

Ganga would point to Simu to explain, and Deepika would remind Phula if she forgot a detail. They are experiencing things they could have never imagined. Like travelling by flight, meeting celebrities, and going abroad for training and matches. Their presence in Delhi is not just a personal journey, but represents lakhs of blind girls who live at the intersection of disability, gender and poverty, where opportunities rarely reach. This opportunity did not land on its own. It was built by people who worked behind the scenes.

‘They Don’t See Blindness As A Disability’

When coach Shikha Shetty first met the women’s blind cricket team, she was struck by how quickly they absorbed the game, and how fiercely they wanted to win.

For Shikha coaching them had to be more than technique, it was about teaching them to trust themselves.

“Since most of the players are from rural backgrounds, there were language and culture are barriers. Families and teachers often don’t want them to pursue sport. Even explaining the rules of blind cricket took time,” she says.

Some of these girls had never stepped out of their village alone, yet she refused to treat their blindness as a limitation. “I’ve known them for over a decade. They don’t see their blindness as a disability. Despite gaps in infrastructure and inclusion, they only talk about what works for them,” she says.

Shikha says around 5,000 blind girls have shown interest in sports, but the system is still not ready. “There is a need for a dedicated ground for them. They need safety nets and accessible training spaces,” she says.

The World Cup, she believes, has already shifted something. “Families will feel more confident letting their daughters play. It will not feel like an unknown path anymore.”

‘We Were Doing Injustice To Women’

Mahantesh G Kivadasannavar, the chairperson of the Cricket Association for the Blind in India (CABI), is himself visually challenged and the founder of Samarthanam, a disability rights organisation. For him, the women’s blind cricket team was not just a sports initiative. It was a long-overdue correction. “We were doing injustice to women,” he says.

The CABI was established in 2011, but scouting for a women’s team only began in 2019. The first international match for the women’s team came in 2023, followed by a gold medal at the International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA) World Games in Birmingham.

Mahantesh says that even after the team began to take shape, the path remained difficult. There was no infrastructure, no funding, and no institutional backing as the system had never been designed for them.

What Visibility Can Change?

Mahantesh believes that the tournament has created a new blueprint for blind cricket in India. The World Cup matches were streamed on CABI’s YouTube channel, Prasar Bharati platforms, and broadcast on Doordarshan. For the first time, the country could see blind women play on the field.

“Visibility is the biggest thing. When people see these women perform, they start believing. When the country watches, barriers start to break.”

Mahantesh insists that the victory is not only about cricket. It is part of a wider fight for disability rights and equality. “With this World Cup, we have built a foundation, Now, we must build a system that does not ignore them.”