Harsh and Naimi Mehta rally to win Indian Open mixed doubles title

Harsh and Naimi Mehta lost the first game, then turned the Indian Open mixed doubles final into a statement win. After edging Arjun Singh and Naomi Amalsadiwala 10-11 in the opener, the Mehtas reset fast and rolled through the next two games 11-2, 11-6 to claim the Pro Mixed Doubles title at CrossCourts in Hyderabad.

That swing told the real story. The first game was tight enough to feel like a coin flip, but once Harsh and Naimi settled in, the match changed shape. They tightened their shot selection, took control through the middle phases of rallies and stopped giving Singh and Amalsadiwala easy points. By the end, the final looked less like a nervous title match and more like a pair that had found the gears the rest of the field could not reach.

Naimi Mehta called it “a very close match,” and the scoreline backed that up. The pressure was amplified by the stage around it. The Indian Open 2026 was a PWR 1000 event sanctioned by the Indian Pickleball Association and organized by Global Sports, with pre-event reporting putting the field at more than 1,100 players across 54 categories and a prize pool of $50,000. In other words, this was not a small-bracket win. It came in one of the deepest and most competitive stops on the Indian calendar.

That matters for how Harsh and Naimi are viewed now. In a tournament that drew national attention and packed a week of play from April 1 to April 5, the pair did more than survive a tough final. They showed they can absorb an early punch, make tactical corrections and finish with authority. That is the profile of a team that can travel beyond one event and become the side others have to game-plan against in Indian and wider Asian mixed doubles.

The result also capped a big Hyderabad run for Naimi Mehta, who added the Pro Women’s Doubles title with Isha Lakhani. Harsh and Naimi left Hyderabad with gold, but more importantly, they left with evidence that their ceiling is higher than a single title run. On this evidence, they are no longer just the latest champions. They look like the benchmark.