India vs Nepal ODI Head-to-Head: Record & Results

India and Nepal have played one one-day international. It took place at the Pallekele International Cricket Stadium near Kandy on 4 September 2023, in the group stage of the Asia Cup, and India won by ten wickets on the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method with seventeen balls to spare.

That single result carries more than a scoreline usually does, because of what it was for each side. For India it was a qualifying formality — win and go through to the Super Fours, which they did. For Nepal it was their first fifty-over international against a side ranked in the world's top three, five years after they had acquired ODI status at all.

They did not embarrass themselves. Nepal batted first and made 230, which on a slow Pallekele surface was a total that required India's chase to be organised rather than casual. Rain then intervened, the target was revised, and Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill removed the question entirely with an unbroken opening stand.

The match

Date	Ground	Tournament	Result
4 Sep 2023	Pallekele International Cricket Stadium, Kandy	Asia Cup, Group A	Nepal 230 (48.2); India 147/0 (20.1). India by 10 wickets (DLS)

India won the toss and bowled. Nepal were dismissed for 230 in 48.2 overs, Aasif Sheikh top-scoring with 58 from 97 balls and Sompal Kami making 48 from 56 at the lower end of the order. Ravindra Jadeja took three for 40 and Mohammed Siraj three for 61.

India had reached 17 without loss in 2.1 overs when rain stopped play. On the resumption the target was revised to 145 from 23 overs, and Rohit Sharma finished on 74 not out and Shubman Gill on 67 not out — 147 for no wicket in 20.1 overs. Rohit took the award. Nepal did not take a wicket in the match.

What Nepal's 230 was worth

The figure to hold onto is Sheikh's 58 from 97 balls. That is not a rapid innings and it was not meant to be: Nepal lost early wickets, and the innings was rebuilt from a position in which 180 looked the ceiling.

Sompal Kami's 48 was the other half of it. Nepal's last four wickets added meaningfully to the total, which is the part of an innings Associate sides most often lose cheaply against attacks of India's quality. Kushal Bhurtel's 38 from 25 at the top and Dipendra Singh Airee's 29 from 25 gave the innings its scoring rate; Sheikh and Kami gave it its length.

Against that, three wickets each for Jadeja and Siraj is the shape of a side that was never in danger. India's bowlers took ten wickets in 48.2 overs and conceded 230 at just over 4.7 an over. On a dry surface at Kandy in September that is a controlled performance rather than a dominant one.

The chase, and what the rain did to it

India were 17 for no loss when the rain came. Under the revised calculation they needed 145 from 23 overs, a required rate of 6.30 rather than the 4.62 the original target implied.

Rohit and Gill treated the recalculated target as an invitation. They reached it in 20.1 overs without being separated, Rohit making 74 from 59 balls and Gill 67 from 62, and the ten-wicket margin is the only such result in the fixture for the obvious reason that it is the only match in the fixture.

It is worth stating plainly what the DLS revision did and did not do. It shortened the match, which helped India, because a shorter chase against a modest total suits the stronger batting side. It also raised the required rate substantially, which would have mattered had India lost two early wickets. They did not.

What the ten-wicket margin conceals

A ten-wicket win reads as annihilation, and in this case it partly is and partly is not. India lost no wickets, so the margin could not have been anything else once they were past the target — but the target was 145, not 231, and the difference matters.

Had the match gone the full distance, India would have needed 231 at 4.62 an over across fifty. That is a chase they would have expected to complete, but it is fifty overs of batting rather than twenty-three, and fifty overs against Lamichhane and Rajbanshi on a turning surface is a different proposition from twenty-three against the new ball. The rain removed the phase of the game in which Nepal's spinners were most likely to matter.

The counterfactual should not be pushed too far. Nepal did not take a wicket in the 20.1 overs they did bowl, and Rohit and Gill were scoring at more than seven an over throughout. But the recorded margin is a product of the revised target as much as of the gap between the sides, and reading it as a pure measure of that gap overstates the case.

Nepal's route to that match

Nepal reached the 2023 Asia Cup by winning the ACC Men's Premier Cup, the qualifying tournament for the region, beating the United Arab Emirates in the final with Lalit Rajbanshi taking four for 14. It was the first time Nepal had qualified for the Asia Cup.

They had gained ODI status in March 2018, by beating Papua New Guinea in a ninth-place play-off at the World Cup Qualifier in Zimbabwe, and played their first one-day international against the Netherlands at Amstelveen that August. Sandeep Lamichhane, who played in the Pallekele match, is the fastest bowler to a hundred ODI wickets, reaching the mark in 42 matches.

Rohit Paudel captained Nepal that day. He had made his ODI debut at seventeen in 2018 and had been the youngest player to score an ODI half-century; he led the side from November 2022 until the captaincy passed to Lamichhane in 2026. Under Paudel, Nepal won eleven of their last twelve World Cup League 2 fixtures in the 2019-2023 cycle and finished in the top three of that competition.

The side Nepal picked

The seventeen named for that Asia Cup tell you something about how a country of Nepal's size builds an international squad. Aasif Sheikh kept wicket and opened; Kushal Bhurtel, Kushal Malla, Dipendra Singh Airee and Aarif Sheikh made up a top order in which several players were still in their early twenties. Sompal Kami and Karan KC carried the seam attack, Lalit Rajbanshi and Sandeep Lamichhane the spin, and Gulsan Jha and Sundeep Jora were among the younger players brought along.

Almost all of them came through the domestic structure run by the Cricket Association of Nepal, most of it played at the Tribhuvan University International Cricket Ground at Kirtipur outside Kathmandu — a venue that first staged a recorded match in an ACC tournament in 1998 and has since been expanded to hold thirteen thousand. It is the only ground in the country to host regular international cricket, which places an unusual weight on a single site.

Nepal became an Associate Member of the ICC in 1996 and played their first tournament that year. Twenty20 status arrived in 2014 and ODI status in 2018. The governing body was suspended by the ICC in 2016 for government interference and reinstated in October 2019, a three-year interruption that fell in the middle of the period in which the players who took the field at Pallekele were coming through.

Where the two sides have gone since

Nepal have kept climbing. In September 2025 they won a bilateral Twenty20 series against the West Indies 2-1, their first series win over a Full Member, and in one match of it dismissed West Indies for 83 — the lowest total any Full Member had made against an Associate side in the format. They have played more than 120 Twenty20 internationals and have won a clear majority of them.

India, in the same period, won a T20 World Cup and an Asia Cup. The gap between the two programmes is not closing quickly, but the assumption that a Nepal fixture is a walkover is less safe than it was in 2023. The one Twenty20 international the sides have played, at the Asian Games a month after Pallekele, is on the India versus Nepal T20I record page.

A second one-day international is not scheduled. Nepal's fifty-over programme runs through World Cup League 2, against Scotland, Oman, Namibia, the UAE, Canada, the United States and Papua New Guinea, and India appear in it not at all. The next meeting, if there is one, will come from an Asia Cup draw or a World Cup qualification pathway rather than from a tour.

For India the fifty-over record and its leaderboards sit on the India ODI history guide, the most ODI runs for India list and the most ODI wickets for India list, and the game's structure in the country is set out on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

The match falls inside the period covered by the complete public ball-by-ball record, so every figure given for it — innings totals, overs, individual scores, balls faced, bowling returns — is computed from the deliveries bowled rather than taken from a summary. The revised target and the method by which it was reached come from the scorecard for the match.

No individual leaderboard is offered, because a one-match fixture does not produce one. The scores named in the text are the innings of that single game and nothing more.

Nepal's route to the tournament, their ODI status, the 2025 series against West Indies and the change of captaincy in 2026 are drawn from published tournament and board records rather than computed here, and are given as context for the one result rather than as part of the head-to-head. Complete to the end of August 2026; the sides have not met in a one-day international since 4 September 2023.