THE SPORTABILITY OF THE SPECIALLY ABLED

India has long underestimated the reservoir of sporting potential within its specially abled community. The Colombo win is a reminder that talent thrives when belief and support meet.

- KARTIKEYA SHARMA

Indian Women's Blind Cricket Team players celebrate after winning the first T20 Blind Women's Cricket World Cup, in Colombo on 23 November. ANI

(ANI)

From Kapil Dev lifting the World Cup at Lord’s in 1983 to the Indian women becoming world champions in 2025, and then the blind women's team lighting up Colombo only days later, Indian cricket has rewritten its own story. What began as a Iong-shot dream has grown into a national movement built on opportunity, courage and the belief that cricket belongs to everyone.

Across these four decades, the cricketing landscape in India has opened in ways once thought unlikely. The women’s game, long treated as an afterthought, was rebuilt through structural reforms: improved contracts, deeper domestic pathways, age-group competitions, sports science support and a professional T20 league. Stability replaced uncertainty. So when the Indian women lifted the 2025 ODI World Cup, it felt less like a miracle and more like the natural outcome of a system finally built to back them.

Nothing captures this new horizon more powerfully than the triumph that followed only a few days later: the Indian blind women’s cricket team winning the inaugural Blind Women’s T20 World Cup in Colombo. They went unbeaten through the tournament and defeated Nepal by seven wickets in the final. This was not only a remarkable win. It was a redefinition of who gets to participate, excel and be celebrated in Indian sport.