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By:

Kiran D. Tare

21 August 2024 at 11:23:13 am

The Lady of Lord’s

Yastika Bhatia’s maiden Test century at Lord’s crowns the rise of an elegant wicketkeeper-batter who has quietly become indispensable to India’s new generation. Critics may say that there are flashier cricketers than Yastika Bhatia. She does not possess the raw power of a Smriti Mandhana or the aura of a Harmanpreet Kaur. She rarely dominates highlight reels or social media clips. Instead, she has built her reputation through reliability – a quality far more vital. At a time when white-ball...

The Lady of Lord’s

Yastika Bhatia’s maiden Test century at Lord’s crowns the rise of an elegant wicketkeeper-batter who has quietly become indispensable to India’s new generation. Critics may say that there are flashier cricketers than Yastika Bhatia. She does not possess the raw power of a Smriti Mandhana or the aura of a Harmanpreet Kaur. She rarely dominates highlight reels or social media clips. Instead, she has built her reputation through reliability – a quality far more vital. At a time when white-ball cricket prizes spectacle, the 24-year-old wicketkeeper-batter has become one of India’s finest practitioners of the understated virtues of timing, patience and composure. Bhatia’s 113 against England which powered the Indian women’s side to a historic win at Lord’s was not merely her maiden Test century but the first ever scored by a woman at cricket’s most celebrated venue. The innings helped India seal a comprehensive 270-run victory in the first women’s Test ever staged at Lord’s. Her hundred earned her a place on the Lord’s honours board, where generations of the game’s greatest names have been immortalised. Few entries have carried quite the same symbolism. Until now, no woman’s name had appeared there for a Test century because no women’s Test had ever been played at the ground. Bhatia’s career has mirrored the evolution of Indian women’s cricket itself. Born in Vadodara, she emerged through Gujarat’s domestic circuit at a time when opportunities for young women were expanding but remained far from abundant. A naturally gifted left-hander, she impressed selectors with a technique that appeared more classical than contemporary. Where modern batting often relies on innovation and improvisation, Bhatia’s game is rooted in balance. She plays late, favours placement over power and rarely appears rushed. Such attributes explain why coaches have long regarded her as especially suited to the demands of Test cricket, even though women are offered precious few opportunities to play the format. Modern wicketkeepers are expected to contribute almost as specialist batters while maintaining relentless concentration over long periods. Bhatia has embraced both responsibilities, becoming an important cog in an Indian side that has steadily shed its dependence on a handful of senior stars. That transformation has accelerated dramatically over the past year. India’s maiden Women’s ODI World Cup triumph marked a watershed for the sport, confirming that the country's women could finally translate promise into silverware. Although Bhatia missed that campaign after suffering an anterior cruciate ligament injury shortly before the tournament, her absence perhaps underscored her growing importance. Months of rehabilitation restored her confidence. If the World Cup represented the one that got away, Lord’s offered redemption. Returning to international cricket only recently, Bhatia produced an innings of remarkable maturity against England’s experienced attack. Her 113 came from 158 balls, balancing restraint with authority as India tightened their grip on the match. She admitted that six months earlier, while beginning rehabilitation, the idea of seeing her name on the Lord’s honours board would have seemed implausible. Those who know her were scarcely surprised. Former Indian wicketkeeper Kiran More, who has mentored Bhatia, has long spoken of her temperament rather than merely her talent. Scoring a century at Lord’s, he observed, is an ambition shared by virtually every cricketer. Achieving it after months away from the game simply reflected the resilience that had always underpinned her cricket. But hers was not a sentimental century assembled through fortune. It was a technically accomplished performance built on judgement outside off stump, crisp drives through the covers and the patience required by the longest format. It showcased precisely why Test cricket continues to matter. Unlike Twenty20, where brilliance can be compressed into a handful of overs, the five-day game rewards concentration accumulated over hours. For Indian women’s cricket, Bhatia’s century represents something larger than an individual milestone. It demonstrates the increasing depth of a side that is no longer defined solely by its biggest names. New heroes are emerging, backed by stronger domestic structures, better coaching and a professionalism unimaginable a decade ago. The honours board at Lord’s records statistics with characteristic restraint. It simply notes that Yastika Bhatia scored a century. Future generations may glance at the name without appreciating the path that led there. But Indian cricket will remember that the first woman to reach three figures at Lord’s was not merely making history. She was announcing that a new generation has arrived.

Why India’s Anti-Coaching Push Misses the Mark

India’s war on coaching centres is being fought everywhere except where it matters most.

In June 2025, the Ministry of Education constituted a high-level committee to examine students’ growing dependence on coaching centres and to recommend measures to reduce it. The MoE’s order is unusually candid in its diagnosis. It acknowledges that Indian schools are not building critical thinking or analytical depth, that rote learning continues to dominate classrooms, that formative assessment remains weak, and that a narrow set of elite institutions exerts disproportionate pressure on students. This official recognition matters. What follows, however, reveals not a lack of insight but a reluctance to confront the problem at its roots.


A review of the committee’s suggestions reveals a familiar pattern. The system wants outcomes to change. But it wants to do it without altering the conditions under which schools and teachers operate. The diagnosis is structural; the response is tactical. Instead of strengthening the foundations of schooling, the recommendations attempt to manage symptoms through alignment, regulation, and additional layers of intervention.


Contradictions Galore

The first contradiction is between awareness and remediation. The MoE order itself asks the committee to assess students' and parents' awareness of multiple career pathways, implicitly acknowledging that fear, uncertainty, and narrow definitions of success drive families to coaching centres. Yet the proposed response is to introduce remedial and mentoring classes within schools to reduce reliance on coaching. This is a fundamental contradiction. If the problem is a lack of clarity, confidence, and judgment, adding more classes, especially exam-aligned ones, does not reduce dependence on coaching; it simply relocates coaching inside schools. The issue is not instructional hours. It is trust in the system’s ability to guide students beyond rank and recall.


A second fault line emerges between concern and design. It becomes pronounced when concerns about student well-being are placed alongside other recommendations. On the one hand, the committee proposes limiting coaching hours due to excessive academic load. On the other hand, it recommends tighter syllabus alignment between boards and competitive exams, time-bound assessments, increased exam frequency, and even earlier entrance testing, possibly as early as Grade 11. To invoke student well-being while engineering exam pressure earlier, deeper, and more relentlessly is not reform but rank hypocrisy. Far less than dismantling coaching, it formalises it.

The structural blind spot is when the recommendations view teachers as a small variable and not as core Infrastructure. The silence here is deafening. Teacher development appears mainly as a technical fix rather than as sustained professional formation. Yet the Ministry’s order itself identifies the core failure: schools are not building reasoning, conceptual understanding, or analytical depth. If that is the problem, the most obvious questions should have been unavoidable. Who is teaching? Under what workload? With how much preparation time? Under what accountability and incentive structures? Instead, the recommendations gravitate towards psychometric analysis, hybrid assessments, Professor of Practice models, national portals, and data pipelines. But none of this substitute for a well-prepared, well-supported, professionally respected teacher in a classroom.


More troubling still is the quiet assumption that teachers will absorb additional responsibilities like exam mentoring, remediation, career counselling without corresponding investment in time, training, or working conditions. The system reclaims the problem but refuses to carry its weight. Teachers are treated as elastic capacity, not as core infrastructure.


Structural Fault

The uncomfortable truth is that students do not turn to coaching centres because schools lack syllabi or examinations. They do so because teachers are overworked and under-supported, class sizes are unmanageable, teaching time is consumed by administrative compliance, career guidance is episodic rather than embedded, and trust in classrooms has steadily eroded. Until teaching becomes a viable, intellectually rewarding profession with protected time to teach, think, mentor and assess, coaching will remain a rational choice for anxious parents and students.


Regulating coaching centres by scrutinising advertisements, limiting hours, mandating disclosures, or policing dummy institutions treats coaching as a disease. It is not. Coaching has emerged because the formal education system cannot carry the weight placed on it.


This brings me to the issue that the committee avoided altogether. And they did it by making Coaching the subject of scrutiny; which now has become a convenient diversion. The flaw lies in the framing itself.


One would wonder, why this obsession with coaching and dummy centres at all? Coaching is not the failure of the system; it is the proof of it. Casting coaching as the problem spares the system from confronting its own structural inadequacies.


The real question was never how to regulate coaching centres, but why families feel compelled to outsource learning in the first place. Until the conversation shifts decisively towards strengthening education infrastructure towards classrooms that are trusted, teachers who are supported, and schools that can carry the weight placed on them, every attempt to curb coaching will remain cosmetic. The shadow will keep returning because the object casting it has been left untouched.


(The writer is a learning and development professional. Views personal.)

 


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