How tennis ball cricket tournaments became a rural lifeline
THERE IS NOTHING quite like the agony and ecstasy of a last-over finish in cricket. Time slows down, anticipation singes the air. Suspended between those uncertain moments is the stuff of life.
Late one night in December 2023, the game tilted towards this crescendo in Tuljapur, a town of about 50,000 people in Maharashtra’s Dharashiv district, formerly known as Osmanabad. Around ten thousand spectators watched in rapt attention.
Floodlights blazed overhead the ground-turned-stadium.An elaborate four-cam setup captured every detail. A large screen replayed the action. A commentator invited from another district oscillated between barbed comments at dropped catches and Marathi euphemisms for clean hits. The ground was flanked with banners featuring local politicians, whose backing had made the match possible.
As 26-year-old Nagesh Rokde prepared to bowl the final over, he occupied centre stage. Tennis ball in hand, he stood on his mark and drew a few steading breaths. Then, he tugged at his jersey around the shoulder—bearing an uncanny resemblance to his boyhood idol, the South African fast bowler Dale Steyn.
Rokde was focussed on the task ahead: keeping the last rival batsman from scoring 10 runs in six deliveries. The batsman scanned the field, taking stock of his opponents’ positions.
With a steady run-up, Rokde landed the ball at a good length—a tactic meant to deceive. The batsman went for a booming drive, but nicked the ball to the wicket keeper instead.
The stadium erupted in rapture. Rokde’s teammates swarmed him, trading hugs and high fives. So hard was the pounding of his heart, he told Object, that the crowd’s roar faded into a distant din. The weight of his worries—the failed monsoon crop, the precarious future—receded too. In that moment, he was a celebrated fast bowler who had led his team to victory, not a farmer grappling with agrarian distress.
A first-time spectator could dismiss this local competition as a bunch of cricket enthusiasts having fun. But for players like Rokde, such matches offer something far more enduring than the sport itself: a way to shore up resilience against daily hardships.
“Cricket gives me hope,” Rokde said. “It makes me feel alive.”
EVEN THE MOST indifferent skeptic has submitted at some point, to the sublime joy that is gully cricket. The improvised set-up, the ever-changing lexicon, and the guarantee of at least one heated argument are a potent mix. It does not level every social divide, but this is the game at its most democratic—unscripted, unruly, and untethered.
Over the last decade, the scrappy sport has morphed into a serious enterprise. Just last year, a glitzy franchise-style street premier league made its debut with a constellation of stars among its team owners, including Amitabh Bachchan and Akshay Kumar. It raked in team bids worth 1,165 crore rupees, corporate sponsorships, and a media deal with India’s largest media conglomerate, JioStar. In an era where capital has defined our relationship with cricket down to its minutest detail, this was almost inevitable.
Across India’s villages, a quieter transformation has been underway. Funded by small business owners, local cricket tournaments promise players plum rewards and a shot at the spotlight.
These aren’t corporate giants, but neighbourhood fixtures—a bakery here, a cycle shop there—that even toss in their own products as prizes. Local hotel owners offer players lodging and meals, while political affiliates contribute with cash prizes that run into lakhs.
In Dharashiv district—a part of Marathwada, which has borne the brunt of a terrible agrarian crisis for at least fifteen years—upto 20 such teams, comprising over 300 farmers and labourers in their mid-twenties-and-thirties, play in several tournaments every year.
The stakes are high. Rokde’s team, for instance, battled 15 other contenders in a week-long series of matches for a cash prize of 1.5 lakh rupees. More than a dozen players interviewed by Object said they make up to 40,000 rupees per month. The online popularity of these sporting events is fuelled by a clutch of YouTube channels that livestream the tournaments to hundreds of thousands of subscribers and over a million viewers, luring more sponsors.
But in a region where lives are routinely eclipsed—and too often, shortened—by crop failures, mounting debts, and systemic neglect, money is far from the only draw.
“Regardless of how tired I am, I never miss the morning practice,” Saudagar Jhadav, a 33-year-old fast bowler and daily-wage labourer from Tulljapur, told Object. “I have spent a lot of years feeling worthless. I treasure this more than anyone else,”
GROWING UP, ROKDE spent after-school evenings playing cricket with his friends in Gondhalwadi, a remote village in Dharashiv district. “As a kid, I wanted to pursue a career in it but we don’t have proper facilities or coaching in our region,” he told Object. “I would have had to migrate to a city, but it was not possible because of our financial situation.” Like most farming households in Maharashtra, Rokde’s family earned between 5,000-6,000 rupees a month then. Life took over; he kept playing for fun.
Some five or six years ago, Rokde took over the six-acre land that his parents, both in their late-sixties, had nurtured for decades. The small-holding farmer spends about 80,000 rupees to cultivate water-intensive soybean in the monsoon, and up to 1,50,000 rupees on onions in the winter. Most of the money is spent on seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, and hiring labourers.
“I need the weather to be consistent to come away with a decent harvest,” Rokde said. “But the rainfall has gotten increasingly erratic. Dry spells are getting longer and when it rains, it pours, washing away everything. I have barely broken even for the past two years.”
In early 2023, Rokde’s soybean harvest failed because of a prolonged drought. He pinned his hopes on the winter onion crop, but in October, a hailstorm ravaged his fields. Despite seven-and-a-half months of gruelling labour—which included irrigating his land at two in the morning, the only time his village had uninterrupted electricity—Rokde came away empty handed.
This is hardly an isolated concern. According to the 2011 Census, of the 19 million people in Marathwada, a third reside in villages and depend on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods. Farmers in the drought-prone region have long faced challenges—from limited crop diversity and inflation to ineffective policies. But over the past few years, extreme weather events such as rising temperatures and heavy rainfall have worsened the challenges.
In September 2024, for instance, torrential showers that exceeded the expected rainfall by 29 percent reportedly laid to waste crops across 8 lakh hectares in Marathwada.
Finding it difficult to sustain themselves, Marathwada’s farmers have had to double up as sugarcane cutters in western Maharashtra and Karnataka. The lack of water has also compelled them to drill deeper borewells, increasing their debts. One borewell can cost more than 1 lakh rupees, with no guarantee that the spot at which it has been dug will yield water.
There is a direct and often immediate link between adverse climate conditions and mental health outcomes, according to Tamma Carleton, an assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Berkeley. “However, it is also becoming increasingly clear that the economic burden of climate change is mounting, particularly in the world’s poorest and most agriculturally dependent populations, such as India,” told Object over an email. In 2017, she had published a research paper on how crop-damaging temperatures were leading to higher suicide rates in India. “These economic impacts can lead to financially motivated mental distress and suicide, creating a second and more enduring link between advancing climate change and declining mental health,” Carleton added.
These losses wreak havoc. Between 2013 and 2022, 26,566 farmers died by suicide in Marathwada, according to state government reports. Over the next two years, the toll went up by 3,090 farmers. In the first three months of this year alone, 269 farmers died by suicide, a 30 percent increase from the same period in 2024.
These haunting numbers likely present an incomplete picture. In June 2023, Sunil Kendrekar, former divisional commissioner of Marathwada, conducted a survey of one million farmers across the region’s eight districts. The report concluded that 100,000 of them were on the brink of ending their lives because of agrarian distress.
Even apart from suicide, the agrarian crisis drives farmers to the edge in other ways. “The agrarian economy can’t sustain a household anymore,” Dr Prashant Chakkarwar, a psychiatrist based in Vidarbha region’s Yavatmal district, told Object, This socio-economic crisis had led to increased incidences of depression, he said. “I have seen farmers spiral into alcohol addiction and substance abuse…they get caught in a vicious cycle,” he added.
It is natural to be overwhelmed under these circumstances, Rokde told Object. “My parents are aging,” the young farmer, who has no siblings said. “They help me out on the farm but I do most of the work. I feel like it is a personal failure when the season doesn’t end in profit.”
Rokde could have easily been one of the thousands of farmers battling depression, stress, and anxiety. But cricket gave him structure and purpose. He had an outlet through which he could channel his energy, stay occupied, and have something to look forward to, he said. “Whatever money I made was a bonus.”
According to Rokde, who belongs to the Sutar community—an oppressed caste included in Maharashtra’s Other Backward Classes—the tournaments had helped dismantle some social barriers. “The players come from different castes and communities. We play together, and win and lose together,” he said. “When players are in the field, we forget where we come from.”
Rokde’s childhood pastime had slowly alchemised into a lifeline.
EVERYDAY AT 6 AM, up to 60 farmers and labourers congregate at the sports complex of the Tulja Bhavani Engineering College. They spend three exhilarating hours in practice before they go their separate ways. Some head to their farmlands, some get back home to study for government exams, others begin their search for labour work.
For Saudagar Jhadav, the daily wage worker from Tuljapur, the act of immersing himself in something he loved helped him access reserves of energy he didn’t even know existed. A decade of manual jobs took its toll. Then Jadhav found cricket. “I used to feel more tired 10 years ago than I do now, even though I am technically exerting myself a lot more.”
Jhadav, a fast bowler, sets off in search of work as soon as he is done with his daily regime. This could be anything from driving trucks, to construction work, or farm labour. He earns anything between 350 to 700 rupees daily. If he finds work, he is physically exhausted by the end of the day. If he doesn’t, he is emotionally drained.
The next morning, he seeks a fresh start.
The cricketing tournaments have given Jadhav a sense of community that had been absent before. Growing up in abject poverty, he was intimately aware of his parents’ struggles, who worked as daily-wage earners too. By his teenage years, he shouldered the responsibility of supporting the family.
“We don’t have farmland of our own,” he said “My parents didn’t have enough money for my higher education. The only way out was labour work.
The abundant availability of daily-wage workers in India leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and unfair pay conditions. Debt-ridden farmers “are no longer able to hire the kind of labour they used to,” Jadhav said. Instead, farmers have begun to double up as labourers, competing with the landless rather than employing them, he added.
This has been a double whammy. “When I started out as a labourer, most would be from landless families,” he recalled. “Today, one member from a farm household goes for labour work while others tend to the farmland because they are no longer confident of making money in this climate.”
In the game, Jadhav found a safe refuge that allowed him to face his troubles with conviction. Over the past two years, which he described as “liberating,” he has been invited to play in cricket leagues in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. “I feel like I have a purpose in life. People treat me with respect because they have seen me on YouTube,” he said. “More importantly, I have begun to respect myself.”
THE TENNIS BALL cricket tournaments in rural Maharashtra typically begin around October, after the monsoons, and go on till May. One tournament usually lasts a week.
Rokde makes about 35,000 rupees a month during an eight-month-long season by playing regularly. For perspective, the average monthly income of an entire farm household in Maharashtra is 11,492 rupees.
The Tuljapur tournament Rokde competed in was organised by a hotelier and a handful of politicians at a cost of 20 lakh rupees. In the two months leading up to the event, the local cricket ground underwent a dramatic makeover: it was levelled, a concrete pitch was installed, floodlights were set up. Commentators and umpires were invited from other districts in the interest of fair play.
The matches began around sunset, at about 5 pm or so, once everyone was done with their work. The family members of some players helped lighten their load; others made sure to finish their tasks earlier. By around 8 pm, after dinner, the crowd grew, settling in to watch the action until midnight, when the final game concluded. None of these matches include women players so far.
Global Tennis Cricket (GTC), a YouTube channel dedicated to broadcasting tennis ball tournaments in Maharashtra, was responsible for the elaborate camera set-up. Every day, it livestreamed the matches for seven hours, raking about 3 million views. Although the channel did not feature any advertising per say, it regularly zoomed in on sponsor banners displayed around the field.
Launched in November 2017, GTC has since amassed nearly 300,000 subscribers. It was co-founded by Jalpesh Bhoir and Sushil Patil, both residents of Thane in Mumbai. Bhoir played tennis ball cricket as a teenager himself. But the sport didn’t command much respect at the time. For him, the YouTube channel was a way to give the game the recognition it deserved. Now, Patil said, most of the channel’s viewers come from lower-income, rural communities.
The company employs more than 40 people, who earn around 20,000 rupees a month, Bhoir said. Once organisers inform GTC of a tournament, a team is dispatched to the match venue, equipment in tow. During the eight-month-long season, the channel covers over 250 tournaments across India. The revenue from YouTube is its main source of income, although GTC also covers non-sporting events for money. Over 100 channels covering tennis ball cricket emerged during the last decade, Bhoir estimated.
What draws viewers, Patil said, is that these are among the few sporting events in which they’re able to watch players they identify with, on their mobile screens. “There are several channels like ours covering similar tennis ball cricket tournaments across India,” he said.
This visibility has made local lawmakers, shopkeepers, and businessmen take notice. Some bid for teams in auctions where the base price is 2,000 rupees. Others pay about 5-10,000 rupees to have their banner advertised. Their contributions benefit the players too.
But it’s not all about the money. At the Tuljapur tournament, the Man of the Match award at every match was a cake worth 150 rupees, sponsored by a local bakery. A businessperson who runs a fruit shop chipped in with a basket of apples, oranges, mosambis, and bananas, for the highest run scorer. Other awards from varied stores included a television set, a washing machine, and bicycles.
“It took us two or three months to put everything together,” Vijay Sargane, who owns Hotel Skyland in Tuljapur, and organised several tournaments, including this one, told Object. “It is a great opportunity for the players to showcase their talent. They have become stars in their districts and villages. People recognize them when they walk in the streets.”
IT COULD BE the arresting tattoo on his arm, the stylish buzz cut, his sporting prowess, or a mix of all three—but wherever Krishna Gawali goes in Tuljapur, many pairs of eyes follow. The 24-year-old, known for his aggressive batting style and signature switch hits, is one of a few dozen players from Marathwada regularly invited to compete in tennis ball cricket leagues across the country.
When Object met him, he had just returned from Navsari in Gujarat, where he won a Yamaha motorbike for winning the “Man of the Series” award. He was bound for a 10-day-long tournament to Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, where the organisers had taken care of every detail, from travel to lodging. “I have even been to Dubai,” Krishna said. Over the past two years, he added, he had made over one lakh rupees every month by playing tennis ball cricket.
Krishna’s family reared livestock across several generations to make ends meet. As a kid, he helped out by delivering milk door-to-door. But his obsession with cricket came in the way. “He would leave the house to deliver the milk but would abandon the task midway to play cricket,” Suvarna, his 48-year-old mother, told Object. “Then his brother or my husband would have to go and pick it up.”
Krishna dreamt of following in the footsteps of the former India captain Virat Kohli. He dreamt of representing the country. But his equipment was simply not good enough. He had never played with a leather ball, wielded a high-quality bat made of willow, or worn protective gear. “It costs more money than what we made in six months,” Kalidas, his 51-year-old father, told Object. Growing up, Krishna’s elder brother had to find his own means to support his engineering education.
Krishna’s neighbours and relatives—teeming with helpful advice, as neighbours and relatives often are—told him to follow his brother’s lead. If he didn’t bury his head in books, he would be “stuck in his father’s dairy business,” he recalled them warning him.
Krishna was unruffled, but it bothered his parents. “We had no clue one could earn money by playing tennis ball cricket,” Suvarna said. “We were worried for his future. I didn’t want him to continue the family business. It is a recipe for disaster.”
There was a time in the late nineties, when Kalidas supplied milk to over 100 families. The number has since dwindled to about 25 households because the family, which has three buffaloes, can’t afford to operate at a larger scale. Forage crops such as jowar, bajra, and maize don’t grow in a drought-prone region, and natural pastures suffer too, creating a scarcity of fodder. The family makes about 15,000 rupees a month from this work.
Lately, as the dry spells had become more frequent, the fodder had become more expensive. It isn’t the only cost the family has to factor in. Often, Suvarna and Kalidas queue for hours to fill one bucket of water at the cost of two-four rupees for every litre. For context, one buffalo needs about 30-40 litres of water everyday.
“How do you maintain your livestock if you end up spending a fortune on two things that used to cost nothing?” Kalidas asked. “The buffalos only give milk for six months of the year. But you still have to feed and wash them for the other six months. And on top of that, the milk prices keep fluctuating in the market.”
Krishna always told his mother that cricket would take care of them. “We didn’t stop him as a kid because it made him really happy,” she said, “We don’t stop him now because he has kept his promise. We are proud of him.”
Shelves groaning under the weight of the trophies that Krishna has won greet a visitor entering the Gawalis’ two-room house. “I don’t think I would have been able to do it without my parents’ support,” Krishna said. “Having seen poverty, they just didn’t want to see me poor. Whatever I earn today, I keep a bit of it for myself, and give the rest of it to my parents.”
Young children—and even his peers—now look up to Krishna as a source of inspiration. At one match, the player who won the “Man of the Match” award declared Krishna his idol, and said that he had taken up the sport because of him. Neighbours, relatives, and parents want him to train their kids because they’ve realised the value of keeping their children active. This way, they wouldn’t be “staring at their phones like zombies,” he said.
“The idea is to give them a reason to live in times of agrarian distress,” Krishna said. “Tournaments are increasing not just in Maharashtra but across the country. We need to practice hard to break into tennis ball tournaments in other states.”
THE TROUBLES THAT the people from Marathwada are navigating are long-term and societal, often brought upon by factors outside their control.
But often, the pursuit of sports, a hobby, or even academics, can help a person in mental health distress boost their confidence, Anand Nadkarni, founder of the Thane-based Institute for Psychological Health, which works with rural communities in Maharashtra, told Object. “The people in Marathwada are doing exactly that. This is a fascinating social phenomenon,” he added.
Nadkarni warned of a potential pitfall.
“The process may not be entirely healthy on a long-term basis because your self worth is exposed to the ups and downs in cricket,” he said. “The same thing that gives you hope could bring distress.”
But it could certainly spark purpose and new beginnings, he added.
For Rokde, it did precisely that.
In 2024, he enrolled himself in an MBA program in the neighbouring district of Solapur, with the hope of landing a job in finance. He had initially pursued a Mass Communication degree because he wanted to be a journalist. “But we didn’t have enough money for further education and we didn’t even have any contacts,” Rodke recalled, “I had no clue how to start, and I wasn’t confident enough to approach people. I thought I was destined to be a farmer, which made me even more hopeless.”
It was to address this kind of distress that the central government introduced the District Mental Health Programme in 1996. It mandated the presence of a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, a psychiatric nurse, and a psychiatric social worker in every district hospital. In addition, the community health centre at the taluka level was supposed to have a full-time clinical psychologist or a psychiatric social worker.
But in Maharashtra, the programme made little impact on the ground. Between 2019 and 2022, the central and state governments sanctioned nearly 158 crore rupees. But the Maharashtra government barely spent 5.5 percent of that budget—about 8.5 crore rupees. “There is a serious lack of qualified staff at the taluka level, which farmers with mental health issues have to travel all the way to the district headquarters,” psychiatrist Prashant Chakkarwar said. “Mental health programs work when help reaches people where they are.”
The lack of state intervention has left marginalised agrarian communities dangerously vulnerable. Post-traumatic stress disorders, clinical depression, and fear about the future are prevalent among the farmers in rural Maharashtra suffering from unpredictable weather events, Praful Kapse, a 37-year-old psychiatric social worker, told Object.
“Farmers don’t have any other source of income,” he said. “Stress, when untreated, converts into distress, eventually leading to depression. At an initial stage, depression can be treated with counselling. But one needs medication at later stages, when suicidal thoughts creep in.”
Rokde was lucky enough to find cricket before it got to that stage. Within a year of playing tennis ball tournaments, he regained his verve. He found a community of people who were navigating the same crests and troughs as him. He no longer felt isolated in his struggles. He dreamt of a different life. “I believe I have a better future ahead of me,” he said.
