In November 2025, somewhere in a stadium that erupted with the kind of joy reserved for genuine firsts, India’s women’s blind cricket team defeated Nepal to claim the inaugural T20 World Cup for the Blind. For most of the country, it was a headline. For Dr. Mahantesh G. Kivadasannavar, it was something else entirely validation, measured and hard-won, of over 15 years of work that many had quietly doubted would ever amount to this.
“Now it’s getting proved,” he tells The Logical Indian, his words carrying the quiet weight of someone who had spent a decade and a half saying this is possible before the world finally agreed.
A Childhood Built on Barriers
Dr. Mahantesh was born in September 1970 in rural Belgaum district, Karnataka. At six months old, complications from typhoid permanently destroyed his optic nerves. He has never known sight. What he has always known, however, is the particular exhaustion of navigating a world that was not designed with him in mind.
In rural Karnataka of the 1970s and 80s, the idea of formal education for a visually impaired child was not so much controversial as it was simply absent. Schools that could accommodate him did not exist nearby. Support structures were non-existent. And so, while his peers began their schooling at five or six, Dr. Mahantesh started at ten, already four to five years behind, through no fault of his own.
“At every step there are challenges,” he reflects. “At every institution there are barriers and blocks.”
What saved him, he readily acknowledges, was family. Progressive and fiercely committed to his participation in every dimension of village life, his parents ensured he was never made to feel like a spectator in his own community. That foundation of stubborn belonging would go on to define everything he built.
By 1990, he had begun playing competitive blind cricket, and by 1994 he was captaining his team. He went on to earn a BA, MA, and MPhil in English Literature from Bangalore University; proof, if it were needed, that the only thing limiting his potential had ever been the environment around him, never the mind within him.
Building the Model They Wished Had Existed
In 1997, at just 26 years old, Dr. Mahantesh co-founded Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled alongside Nagesh S.P. Their office was a 400-square-foot room in Bengaluru. Their ambition was considerably larger.
The philosophy driving Samarthanam was simple but radical in its insistence: if you want the world to become more inclusive, stop waiting for it and build the model yourself. “Samarthanam always believes in walk the talk,” Dr. Mahantesh explains. “When you talk about something, you should have an example to justify.”
Rather than lobbying from the outside, they invited government officials and corporate leaders in — literally. Visitors toured Samarthanam’s accessible schools, moving through corridors fitted with ramps and smart boards, watching blind students navigate digital tools with fluency. The implicit message was unmistakable: this works, and you can replicate it. Many did.
Nearly three decades later, the organisation educates 34,000 students annually. It has trained 51,000 more with a 70% placement rate, and has secured over 35,700 jobs and have scaled this in a structured manner through their HR Partner Samastra Talent Solutions which identifies a pool of corporates to filter talent and create a pipeline for skilled PwD and non PwD candidates for dignified jobs in large MNCs. Thirty to thirty-five percent of Samarthanam’s own leadership staff are disabled, all on full pay parity. The organisation does not merely advocate for inclusion it practises it, visibly and uncompromisingly.
Why Cricket?Â
To understand why Dr. Mahantesh chose cricket as his primary vehicle for empowerment, we have to understand what cricket meant to a blind child growing up in India in the 1980s.
It came through the radio. Ball by ball, over by over, through the voice of commentators who painted pictures with words that is how Dr. Mahantesh fell in love with the game. “As a child I grew up listening to cricket commentary, listening to the game very closely and started feeling and playing and following,” he recalled. “Probably I started living with cricket.”
Cricket, he realised early, is uniquely suited to visually impaired players not despite its structure, but because of it. Everything in the game is sequential. Every action flows from the ball. There are no sudden spatial demands that disadvantage a blind player in the way a fast-moving sport might. It is, in his words, “a very structured, systematic game.”
Beyond accessibility, he saw cricket as a builder of character and cognition. “It builds many positive qualities like strategy, like defense, defending the title,” he says. “There are many mathematical calculations asking for run rate, current run rate, required run rate. It teaches you maths. It is a very scientific game.”
But perhaps most compellingly, cricket unites. In a country as vast and linguistically diverse as India, cricket is one of the few forces that dissolves difference. “Cricket is one which unites all of us cutting across regions, languages and barriers,” Dr. Mahantesh says. “So I felt, why not cricket be a medium of empowerment? It could be a life-changing game for the visually impaired.”
Samarthanam launched its first blind cricket camps in 2000. In 2010, when the organisation managing blind cricket in India was on the verge of shutting down, Dr. Mahantesh stepped in to revive and rebuild what is now known as the Cricket Association for the Blind in India (CABI), with him as Founder Chairman. Since then, under his leadership, India has grown into a dominant force in blind cricket most recently claiming the landmark 2025 women’s T20 World Cup title. The number of active blind cricketers in the country has grown from a small cluster of enthusiasts to over 30,000 players nationwide.
After the Trophy: The Work That Remains
When India won, the celebrations were loud and deserved. Dr. Mahantesh allowed himself the moment and then immediately looked past it.
“Our consistent effort and belief that our people can play internationally now it’s getting proved,” he says. “But there’s still a very long way to go. Recognition must sustain; celebration shouldn’t end.”
This is not false modesty. It is a hard lesson drawn from experience. Trophy ceremonies are easy. Sustaining the infrastructure that produces champions is not. What Dr. Mahantesh demands, in plain terms, is persistent funding, long-term corporate social responsibility commitments, brands that endorse blind athletes across years rather than in the glow of a single victory, and media that continues to cover the sport when there is no World Cup to report.
Most urgently, he demands economic dignity for the players themselves. “Players need economic value and permanent jobs,” he says. “Awards, mainstream acceptance.” A World Cup winner should not have to wonder, upon returning home, whether she can afford to keep playing.
He also acknowledged BCCI’s recent support for CABI as a meaningful step, one he hopes marks the beginning of a deeper, lasting relationship rather than a one-time gesture.
The Employment Wall
Across all of Samarthanam’s work, education, sports, skills training; Dr. Mahantesh identifies one challenge as the most formidable and most stubborn: employment.
“Definitely employment,” he says, with the bluntness of someone who has been confronting this wall for thirty years. “The visually impaired get sympathy, but employers hesitate to take the risk. Major dropouts happen there.”
Sympathy, he has learned, is the enemy of real inclusion. It keeps disabled individuals in a category of beneficiaries rather than contributors. What actually works, what Samarthanam has proven works is a deliberate, structural commitment to diversity that reaches beyond HR policy to the daily culture of a workplace.
Line managers must be trained before a disabled employee ever walks through the door. Proper accommodations, screen readers, adjustable workstations must be in place from day one. And then, given the right environment, something consistently happens: disabled employees perform equally well, or better, than their peers. “Once settled, they perform equally well or better,” Dr. Mahantesh explains. The risk employers fear is not real. The hesitation is.
Technology: The Great EqualizerÂ
Dr. Mahantesh speaks about technology with the particular passion of someone who has seen it transform lives firsthand. “Technology is the biggest enabler,” he says. “It makes things easier for non-disabled people. For us, it makes the impossible possible.”
His vision is of a world where accessibility is built into technology from the ground up, not retrofitted as an afterthought, not available only to those who can afford premium adaptations, but present from the first line of code. “No retrofitting needed. You get a level playing field.”
Samarthanam has built this vision into its skilling programmes, where visually impaired youth master BPO operations, software testing, and digital marketing using screen readers and voice commands. Technology, properly deployed, erases limitations.
But accessing that technology is itself a barrier for most visually impaired Indians. Dr. Mahantesh is unflinching about the gap between promise and reality. “Availability, affordability, and accessibility of tech devices are the biggest limitations,” he said. The majority of India’s visually impaired population lives in rural areas: unreliable electricity, limited device access, and digital tools largely designed for Western users and English speakers.
Premium screen readers cost more than entire annual incomes in rural India. Free alternatives remain poorly adapted for Indian accents and vernacular languages. “Most are developed in western countries at very high costs,” he noted. Samarthanam counters with subsidised tech labs and vernacular training modules but the scale of the problem dwarfs any single organisation’s capacity to solve it.
“Technology transforms lives when it reaches people,” Dr. Mahantesh says. “Right now, it transforms only those lucky enough to access it.”
Growing Up or Dying: The Law of Institutional Life
Reflecting on nearly three decades of building Samarthanam from a single room to operations across 12 states, 700-plus staff, and tens of thousands of lives touched annually, Dr. Mahantesh distils the secret of institutional survival into a single, unsparing observation.
“Stamina of persistent growth is very important. Working towards sustainability constantly while sustaining also should go. Because if you don’t grow, you stagnate and you deteriorate.”
The needs of 1997 are not the needs of 2025. The Samarthanam that began by teaching Braille literacy and installing ramps now runs AI literacy programmes and international cricket academies. “What was basic infrastructure 30 years ago is obsolete now. Yesterday’s luxury is today’s necessity.”
The goal for the next phase is ambitious: one million lives impacted by 2030, through simultaneous execution across every possible programme, funding stream, and geographic expansion. “You should pursue with a strong purpose and change according to time,” Dr. Mahantesh advises. Purpose without evolution, he warns, is simply a slower path to extinction.
The Actual Disability
At the heart of everything Dr. Mahantesh has built a challenge to the way India and the world has historically thought about disability.
The barriers he faced as a six-year-old were not created by the damage to his optic nerves. They were created by schools without ramps, by employers who saw risk instead of potential, by technology built for people unlike him, by a society that had simply not bothered to ask what he might contribute if given the chance.
“Recognize disabled people’s ability as potential contributors and invest in unleashing it,” he urges. “Uplifting the most marginalized uplifts the entire society.”
India’s women’s blind cricket team is World Cup champions. Thirty thousand blind cricketers play across this country. Thirty-nine thousand people have been placed in jobs they might otherwise never have accessed. These are not acts of charity. They are returns on investment; proof that potential, given the right conditions, delivers.
The trophy has been won. The work continues.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Dr. Mahantesh’s journey shows grassroots determination beats all odds, transforming societal barriers into historic triumphs. This path validates inclusive empowerment as the real game-changer for India’s disabled community.
If you’d like us to feature your story, please write to us at csr@5w1h.media
