MUMBAI: The Indian women’s cricket team may have suffered an early exit from the 2026 Women’s T20 World Cup, but India will still be represented in the tournament’s biggest match – and in historic fashion.Vrinda Rathi, who hails from Nerul in Navi Mumbai, has been appointed by the International Cricket Council (ICC) as one of the on-field umpires for the Women’s T20 World Cup final between hosts England and Australia at the iconic Lord’s Cricket Ground on Sunday. He will officiate with Jacqueline Williams.Rathi’s appointment marks an important milestone, as she becomes India’s first female umpire to officiate a Women’s World Cup final. He is also the second Indian umpire to officiate in an ICC World Cup final after Ram Babu Gupta, who officiated the 1987 Men’s World Cup final at the Eden Gardens with Pakistan’s Mahboob Shah. Match referee GS Lakshmi, on the other hand, officiated the 2023 and 2024 Women’s T20 World Cup finals.The 37-year-old Rathi has built an impressive officiating career, standing in 20 Women’s One-Day Internationals, 77 Women’s T20 Internationals and one Women’s Test match.“She is a good, hard-working umpire. She is one of the top umpires on the ICC panel in the women’s game. She was a scorer originally. Then, she became an umpire at my insistence. ‘You can have a career in umpiring,’ I told her. In 2014, Rathi took the umpires exam in Mumbai, after four years of Cricket Association, passed the Mumbai Cricket exam. conducted by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (in 2018). Within a year (in 2020), he, along with Narayanan Janani, has been promoted to the ICC Development Panel of Umpires,” Ganesh Iyer, former BCCI umpire and ex-chairman of the Mumbai Cricket Association’s umpiring committee, told TOI.Before umpiring, Rathi was a medium-pacer and represented the Mumbai University women’s team for four years, though she never made it to the Mumbai senior women’s side.Rathi made history in December 2023 when she became the first Indian woman to officiate a women’s Test match, standing in the one-off Test between India and England at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai.His rise through the officiating ranks was rapid. In 2022, he is in charge of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. On 10 January 2023, she, along with Janani Narayanan, became one of the first women to stand as on-field umpires in a men’s domestic match in India, officiating the Ranji Trophy fixture between Goa and Pondicherry.In 2023, Rathi also officiated at the Women’s T20 World Cup in South Africa, stood in the final of the inaugural Women’s Premier League and was part of the officiating panel at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China.