He Lost Both Eyes by Age 8 & Survived 18 Surgeries. At 30, He Cleared UPSC With AIR 957

For days now, the small house in Naidkhai village has barely had a quiet moment. Neighbours keep dropping in. Relatives travel down from nearby districts. Children peek through the doorway. There is no wedding, no festival. The visitors have come to meet Irfan Ahmad Lone, the 30-year-old son of a casual labourer who has just done what no one from Bandipora district has ever done before.

He has cleared the UPSC Civil Services Examination, securing an All India Rank of 957 in the 2025 batch. And he has done it without being able to see the question paper.

To understand what that rank really means, you have to go back to a summer afternoon in 1999, when Irfan was four years old and still chasing his friends through the lanes of his village in north Kashmir.

“I come from a humble background. My father is a casual labourer in the irrigation department. Initially, I was a normal boy without any disabilities,” Irfan says.

Then came the syringe. He was playing outside his home when it slipped and pierced his eye. The vision in that eye was gone almost instantly. The family rushed him from one hospital to another, hoping something could be saved. A few years later, while he was in school, a pencil took the second eye too.

“I was studying in a local school when I lost my second eye accidentally while playing with a pencil,” he says.

The boy who used to run through the village lanes was now learning to find his way around his own home in the dark.

18 surgeries & a lifetime of sacrifice 

His father, Bashir Ahmad Lone, refused to accept it. A casual labourer earning a small monthly wage, he began selling whatever the family had — patches of land, household assets, anything that could be turned into hospital fees.

“My father tried very hard and sold all his assets, land, and property in order to safeguard my vision,” Irfan says. “Even though his income was very small, my father took me to Delhi, where I was operated on by some of the top doctors.”

Over the next few years, Irfan went under the surgeon’s lights nearly 18 times. One of those operations was at AIIMS, Delhi. For a brief, hopeful stretch, his eyes responded.

“After one operation, I could see around 20–25 percent, but with the passage of time, my vision faded again,” he says.

Eventually, the doctors stopped offering hope. The damage, they said, was permanent. And it was not just sight he had lost. “It was not only my vision which I lost, but I also lost some hearing ability and other sensory or physical capabilities, which made me a child with multiple disabilities,” Irfan says.

Then, in 2002, came the blow that almost broke the family entirely. Irfan’s mother passed away.

“After I lost my vision, I was completely broken. After some months, I lost my mother too,” Irfan says. “That was the point when my family got shattered. I lost my hope and became completely demotivated. These incidents broke us emotionally and financially.”

By any reasonable measure, this is where the story should have ended. A blind boy in a village in Kashmir, a grieving father, no money left, and no school nearby that could teach a child who could not see.

Bashir refused to let that be the ending.

A father’s last gamble: Sending his son to Dehradun

He found out about the National Institute for the Empowerment of Persons with Visual Disabilities Model School in Dehradun, hundreds of kilometres from home, and decided his son was going to study there. He did not have the money. He sent him anyway.

For Irfan, leaving home for the first time was terrifying. But it turned out to be the moment everything began to shift.

“It is rightly said that there is a ray of light after darkness. For me, that ray of light was the school in Dehradun. Being in that school and learning with other visually impaired students helped me rise again. That was the turning point of my life,” he says.

In Dehradun, he learned Braille. He figured out how to use screen-reading software. He sat among other children who could not see and discovered, slowly, that not seeing did not mean not knowing. He started to dream again, and this time the dreams were bigger.

From Braille to books: A journey to india’s top universities

After school, Irfan applied to Hindu College, one of the most prestigious institutions under the University of Delhi, and got in. He studied Political Science there, listening to textbooks read aloud by software, taking notes in audio, sitting through lectures with classmates who could see the blackboard he could not. He went on to Jawaharlal Nehru University and completed his master’s in International Relations.

All through this, his father’s bank balance was always on his mind.

“I was always aware of the financial condition of my family. That is why I decided to prepare for banking examinations so that I could support them,” he says.

The final hurdle: UPSC with full-time work

He cracked the bank exam on his first try and joined Punjab National Bank in Delhi. Sixteen months later, he sat for the LIC officers’ exam, again as a side effort, and cleared that too on the first attempt, joining as an Assistant Administrative Officer. For most families in Naidkhai, two government jobs in one lifetime would be the dream. For Bashir, it was not enough.

“My father has always trusted me. Even after I qualified for two exams and got a good job, he told me to prepare for the UPSC exam,” Irfan says. “My father said that no one from our district had qualified before. That motivated me to work hard for his dream.”

Anyone who has prepared for UPSC knows what it asks of a person. Now imagine doing it after a full day at the office, with no printed books you can read, only a screen reader patiently spelling out NCERTs and Laxmikanth and current affairs into your ears, hour after hour, late into the night.

“Preparing with screen-reading software while doing a regular job was a big challenge,” he says.

He picked Political Science as his optional, drew on what he had studied in Delhi and JNU, and went at it. The first attempt did not work. The second one did not either. He kept going.

“In my third attempt, I was able to crack the UPSC examination,” he says.

His service allocation has not been announced yet. But back in Naidkhai, that detail is almost beside the point. Children in the village now lead visitors to his door. Older men recount his story on tea-shop benches. The boy whose eyes were taken from him before he could spell his own name has put his district on the UPSC list for the first time in history.

‘Disability shouldn’t stop dreams’

Irfan, for his part, wants people to focus less on him and more on what his story might mean for someone else’s son or daughter.

“Through this success, I want to give a message to the youth and parents of Bandipora that if I, despite being visually impaired, can crack this exam, others can do it too,” he says.

He has a particular request for parents of children with disabilities, the ones who are afraid to let their kids out of the house, the ones who think the safest thing is to keep them close.

“Education is a right for everyone and disability should not become a barrier. Sometimes parents become overprotective and keep their children at home. But by interacting with people from different cultures and places, students learn to think big and compete with the world,” he says.

Somewhere in Naidkhai, a casual labourer who once sold his land to save his son’s eyes is watching the visitors come and go. He could not give Irfan his sight back. He gave him something else instead.

He believed him into a future no one in Bandipora had reached before.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thebetterindia.com