India vs Nepal T20I Head-to-Head: Record & Results

India and Nepal have played one Twenty20 international, on 3 October 2023, in the quarter-final of the Asian Games cricket competition at Hangzhou. India made 202 for 4 and Nepal replied with 179 for 9. The margin was 23 runs.

Two things make the match worth more than its one line in the ledger. The first is that Yashasvi Jaiswal made exactly 100 from 49 balls, his maiden hundred in the format, and at twenty-one years and 279 days became India's youngest Twenty20 international centurion — a record Shubman Gill had set earlier the same year. The second is that Nepal's 179 for 9 was the closest any side got to India across that tournament, which India finished with the gold medal.

The fixture is one match old because there has been no route to a second. India played only four matches at the Asian Games; Nepal's Twenty20 calendar runs through Asian qualifying competitions and bilateral series with other Associate sides. Their single one-day international, a month before this one, is on the India versus Nepal ODI record page.

The match

Date	Ground	Tournament	Result
3 Oct 2023	Zhejiang University of Technology Cricket Field, Hangzhou	Asian Games, quarter-final	India 202/4; Nepal 179/9. India by 23 runs

India batted first. Yashasvi Jaiswal's 100 came from 49 balls with eight fours and seven sixes, and Rinku Singh finished the innings with 37 not out from 15. Ruturaj Gaikwad, captaining, made 25 from 23 and Shivam Dube 25 from 19.

Nepal's reply reached 179 for 9. Dipendra Singh Airee made 32 from 15, Kushal Malla 29 from 22, Sundeep Jora 29 from 12 and Kushal Bhurtel 28 from 32. Avesh Khan took three for 32 and Ravi Bishnoi three for 24. No individual award is recorded on the scorecard for the match.

The innings that defined it

Jaiswal opened and was still there when he reached three figures, which is the whole story of India's total. Seven sixes in a Twenty20 international hundred is not remarkable in itself; making exactly 100 from 49 balls at an Asian Games, on a ground that had never staged a match at that level, against an attack including Sandeep Lamichhane, is a more particular achievement.

The record he took — India's youngest centurion in the format — had been held for a matter of months. Gill had reached the mark at twenty-three years and 146 days in January of the same year. Jaiswal was two years younger. He had made his Twenty20 international debut nine months earlier and would open the batting in Test cricket for India within a further nine.

Rinku Singh's 37 not out from 15 is the other half of the total. India were well set at the start of the last four overs and Rinku turned a good score into a difficult one, which is the role he had been given in the side that year.

Nepal's 179

Chasing 203 against a full-strength India batting effort, Nepal lost nine wickets and finished 23 short. That is a defeat, and it is also the best any side managed against India in the tournament.

The reply was built by short, fast innings rather than one long one. Airee's 32 from 15 and Jora's 29 from 12 were the two that kept the required rate within reach into the middle overs; Malla's 29 from 22 and Bhurtel's 28 from 32 gave the innings its base. Nobody made fifty, which is why 179 was where it stopped: four batters between 28 and 32, and no partnership long enough to take the chase past the point where the required rate becomes the whole problem. Bhurtel's 28 took 32 balls, and in a chase of 203 that is the innings the scorecard punishes even though it was the one holding the top order together.

Kushal Malla is worth naming for a separate reason. Later in that same tournament, against Mongolia, he made a hundred from 34 balls — at the time the fastest in Twenty20 internationals. Nepal's batting has a capacity for extremes that the 179 does not fully show.

Against that, Avesh Khan and Ravi Bishnoi took three wickets each and India's bowlers conceded 179 in twenty overs, which on a small ground with a fast outfield is a competent rather than a commanding return.

Why the match counts as a full international

An Asian Games fixture might be assumed to sit outside the official record, in the way that some multi-sport and exhibition cricket does. This one does not. It was played with full Twenty20 international status and carries a match number in the sequence — the 2,278th men's T20I — which is why Jaiswal's hundred counts as a Twenty20 international century and why the age record he took from Shubman Gill was a Twenty20 international record rather than a tournament one.

The condition is straightforward: both sides must be ICC members fielding representative national teams, and the match must be scheduled as a Twenty20 with the standard playing conditions. India and Nepal both qualified, so the quarter-final counts exactly as an Asia Cup group match would.

That has a practical consequence for this page. The one meeting between the sides is a genuine head-to-head result rather than a footnote, and India's record against Nepal in the format is played one, won one — not played nil.

The Asian Games as a fixture generator

Cricket returned to the Asian Games in 2023 after a twelve-year absence, and the men's competition was played as a knockout with the higher-ranked sides entering at the quarter-final stage. India entered there, beat Nepal, beat Bangladesh in the semi-final, and were awarded the gold medal when rain prevented the final against Afghanistan from producing a result.

India's squad was captained by Ruturaj Gaikwad and made up of players outside the first-choice Twenty20 side, several of whom — Jaiswal, Rinku Singh, Dube, Bishnoi — went on to become regulars. That is the usual pattern for a multi-sport games: the tournament falls outside the international window, so squads are drawn from the tier below.

For Nepal the calculation was the reverse. This was close to their strongest available side, at a tournament that gave them a fixture against India they could not have arranged any other way. That asymmetry is the reason the fixture exists at all, and the reason it has not been repeated: cricket's place in the Asian Games programme is not guaranteed edition to edition.

What has happened since

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

India, over the same period, won the T20 World Cup and defended it. The distance between the programmes remains large, but a Nepal side that can bowl out a Full Member for 83 is not the side that chased 203 at Hangzhou.

The infrastructure has moved with the results. Nepal's international cricket is played almost entirely at the Tribhuvan University International Cricket Ground at Kirtipur, outside Kathmandu, which has been expanded to a capacity of around thirteen thousand with further work planned; a domestic Twenty20 league runs alongside the national programme. Nepal became an ICC Associate Member in 1996 and acquired Twenty20 international status in 2014, so the Hangzhou match came nine years into their existence in the format.

A second meeting would need an Asia Cup draw, a World Cup group or another Asian Games. None is currently scheduled, and the Asian Games route is the least reliable of the three: cricket was absent from the programme between 2010 and 2023 and its inclusion is decided edition by edition. India's records in the format sit on the most T20I runs for India and fastest T20I centuries for India leaderboards, and the wider game in the country is covered on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

The match is inside the period for which the complete public ball-by-ball record exists, so the score, the individual figures, the balls faced and the bowling returns are all computed from the deliveries bowled rather than taken from a summary. The absence of a player-of-the-match award reflects the scorecard, which records none.

No aggregate leaderboard is offered, because one match does not produce one. Every individual figure named is from that single game.

Jaiswal's age at the time of the hundred and the record it took from Shubman Gill, Kushal Malla's 34-ball hundred against Mongolia later in the tournament, India's route to the gold medal and Nepal's 2025 series against the West Indies all come from published tournament and match records and are given as context rather than as head-to-head data. Complete to the end of August 2026; the sides have not met in a Twenty20 international since 3 October 2023.