Mahantesh G Kivadasannavar

Mahantesh G. Kivadasannavar, born on 28 September 1970 in the village of Neginhal in Karnataka, lost his sight at six months old. He worked his way through school and college with distinction, took an MA and MPhil in English literature at the University of Bangalore, and taught English for five years at the University Law College. The conviction that emerged from that experience — that disabled people should be taxpayers rather than recipients of doles — became the argument on which he built his social work.

In 1997 he founded Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled in Bengaluru with his schoolmate and childhood friend S. P. Nagesh, who was also visually impaired. The trust set out to give disabled and underprivileged people the education, accommodation, food, vocational training and job placement they needed to keep pace with everyone else, and has since built schools, livelihood resource centres, rehabilitation facilities and social enterprises that provide direct employment to people with disabilities and to women in distress. He remains its founder managing trustee and is a persistent advocate of using current technology across its programmes.

His other main contribution has been in sport. He founded and chairs the Cricket Association for the Blind in India, the cricketing arm of Samarthanam, which develops blind cricketers for domestic and international competition, and he was twice elected president of World Blind Cricket. Under his stewardship the Indian men's blind cricket team won the T20 World Cup in 2012 and finished second in 2017, placed fourth and fifth in the ODI World Championships of 2014 and 2018, and won the Asia Cup in 2016 along with a bilateral series and a triangular series in 2018. He argues that people with disabilities should be treated as agents of development rather than only as its beneficiaries.[2][3][4]