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First Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, now another Bihar teen leaves cricket stunned with 306*

Akshara Gupta's monumental innings highlights Bihar's emerging talent in cricket, after Vaibhav Sooryavanshi's success.

Published on: Jun 19, 2026, 18:49:18 IST
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Bihar cricket has found another teenage name to celebrate, and this time the noise has come from the women’s game. After Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s rapid rise pushed the state into the national cricket conversation, Akshara Gupta has produced an innings that has forced attention towards another corner of Bihar’s talent pool.

Akshara Gupta of Bihar, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi for India A. (X images, PTI)
Akshara Gupta of Bihar, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi for India A. (X images, PTI)

Akshara, representing Raxaul in the Bihar Women’s Under-19 One-Day Trophy, smashed an unbeaten 306 off just 126 balls at the Sandis Compound Ground in Bhagalpur. The knock was decorated with 55 fours and eight sixes, turning a domestic age-group match into a statement performance.

Akshara Gupta announces herself with brutal triple century

The scale of Akshara’s innings was staggering. She reached her half-century in only 16 balls and completed her hundred in 34 deliveries, before converting the start into a monumental unbeaten triple century. Her strike rate stood at 242.86, with most of her runs coming through boundaries.

Akshara’s boundary count alone accounted for 268 runs, with 220 coming through fours and 48 through sixes. It underlined not just endurance but complete domination, as she batted through the innings and powered her side to a mammoth 450 in 40 overs.

The spotlight on Akshara comes at a time when Bihar cricket is already enjoying rare national attention because of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. The young left-handed batter from Tajpur has made headlines through his exploits in the IPL and has also earned an India call-up at the age of 15.

That makes Akshara’s knock more than just an individual milestone. It adds weight to the growing sense that Bihar, often not counted among Indian cricket’s traditional power centres, is beginning to produce young players capable of breaking through the noise with extraordinary performances.

Also Read: Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s struggle in ‘probation period’ could force BCCI to rethink

Akshara’s journey also carries a familiar small-town grit. She hails from Raxaul in East Champaran and, according to reports, began playing cricket around the age of eight. With no major formal academy or structured girls’ cricket system around her in the early years, she trained on a backyard pitch with support from her family.

Her father, Raj Kishore Shah, runs a chicken shop, while her mother, Reena Devi, is a homemaker. Her family reportedly helped build the cricketing routine around her, with her father setting up a practice net at home and her mother helping her maintain early-morning discipline.

Akshara’s rise has not happened in isolation either. She was selected for Bihar’s Under-19 women’s team in 2024 and was handed leadership responsibility at a young age. She has also been reported as the first female cricketer from Bihar to feature across all four BCCI women’s age-group tournaments in a short span.

Her triple century will now place her in the same wider conversation as other extraordinary knocks in India’s women’s age-group cricket, including Ira Jadhav’s record 346 not out for Mumbai against Meghalaya in the Women’s Under-19 One-Day Trophy last year.

For Bihar, however, the larger story is the timing. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has already shown that a young cricketer from the state can capture national attention with fearless batting. Akshara Gupta has now delivered a similar reminder from the women’s circuit.

If Vaibhav became Bihar’s breakout boy, Akshara’s unbeaten 306 may well be remembered as the innings that announced Bihar had found another prodigy.

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Probuddha Bhattacharjee

Probuddha Bhattacharjee is a sports writer and analyst with expertise spanning cricket, football, and multi-sport events, with a strong emphasis on data-driven journalism and tactical storytelling. He currently focuses on international cricket, the Indian Premier League, global tournaments, and emerging trends shaping modern sport, blending advanced statistics with strong narrative context to explain performance, strategy, and decision-making. His work aims to bridge the gap between numbers and storytelling, helping readers understand not just what happened on the field, but the tactical and structural reasons behind it. Trained in data journalism through the Google News Initiative (GNI) Data Journalism Lab, Probuddha works extensively with ball-by-ball datasets, performance metrics, and trend-based modelling to produce evidence-backed reports, explainers, and long-form features. His analytical approach focuses not only on outcomes but also on process—selection strategies, phase-wise tactics, workload management, and the influence of preparation and planning on match results. He is particularly interested in how statistical patterns reshape conventional cricketing narratives and provide clearer tactical insight for modern audiences. Beyond cricket, Probuddha has written analytical and news-driven pieces on football and other major sporting events, with a growing interest in sports governance, scheduling dynamics, and the economics of elite competitions. He also tracks how rule changes, franchise structures, and broadcast pressures influence the evolution of contemporary sport. He has previously contributed to platforms such as OneCricket, Sportskeeda, and CrickTracker, and continues to specialise in analytical storytelling, live coverage, and audience-focused reporting. His work prioritises clarity, context, and credibility, while consistently exploring innovative ways to present data through accessible narratives and structured match analysis.

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