India ODI best bowling average: All-Time Records

Jasprit Bumrah has conceded 3,585 runs and taken 151 wickets in one-day internationals for India, which is 23.74 runs per wicket. Mohammed Shami is second on 24.05, Mohammed Siraj third on 25.32. No India bowler with a serious workload in the format has gone under 23.

The striking thing about the head of this list is its date stamp. The top five averages all belong to bowlers who played their first ODI for India in 2013 or later, and four of the five were still active in 2026. That is unusual: on almost every other India career list, the leading names are spread across four decades.

Averages punish small samples badly, so this page counts only bowlers who have delivered at least 2,000 balls — roughly 333 completed overs — for India in the format. Forty players qualify. All forty are ranked below, because a truncated averages table hides the shape of the distribution, which on this measure is the interesting part.

Runs per wicket for India in ODIs, 2,000-ball minimum

Rank	Bowler	Span	Mat	Wkts	Runs	Ave	Econ	SR
1	Jasprit Bumrah	2016-2026	91	151	3585	23.74	4.58	31.0
2	Mohammed Shami	2013-2025	108	206	4955	24.05	5.58	25.8
3	Mohammed Siraj	2019-2026	50	76	1925	25.32	5.13	29.6
4	Kuldeep Yadav	2017-2026	121	194	5247	27.04	5.07	31.9
5	Yuzvendra Chahal	2016-2023	72	121	3283	27.13	5.26	30.9
6	Kapil Dev	1978-1994	225	253	6945	27.45	3.71	44.2
7	Ajit Agarkar	1998-2007	191	288	8021	27.85	5.07	32.9
8	Javagal Srinath	1991-2003	229	315	8847	28.08	4.44	37.8
9	Manoj Prabhakar	1984-1996	130	157	4534	28.87	4.27	40.5
10	Madan Lal	1974-1987	67	73	2137	29.27	4.05	43.3
11	Roger Binny	1980-1987	72	77	2260	29.35	4.58	38.4
12	Irfan Pathan	2004-2012	120	173	5142	29.72	5.26	33.8
13	Zaheer Khan	2000-2012	194	269	8102	30.11	4.95	36.4
14	Munaf Patel	2006-2011	70	86	2603	30.26	4.95	36.6
15	Anil Kumble	1990-2007	269	334	10300	30.83	4.29	43.0
16	Ishant Sharma	2007-2016	80	115	3563	30.98	5.72	32.4
17	Maninder Singh	1983-1993	59	66	2066	31.30	3.95	47.4
18	Ashish Nehra	2001-2011	117	155	4899	31.60	5.21	36.3
19	Venkatapathy Raju	1990-1996	53	63	2014	31.96	4.36	43.9
20	Venkatesh Prasad	1994-2001	161	196	6332	32.30	4.67	41.4
21	Axar Patel	2014-2026	74	80	2619	32.73	4.54	43.2
22	Ravichandran Ashwin	2010-2023	116	156	5180	33.20	4.93	40.4
23	S Sreesanth	2005-2011	53	75	2508	33.44	6.07	33.0
24	Harbhajan Singh	1998-2015	234	265	8872	33.47	4.30	46.6
25	Umesh Yadav	2010-2018	75	106	3565	33.63	6.01	33.5
26	RP Singh	2005-2011	58	69	2343	33.95	5.48	37.1
27	Chetan Sharma	1983-1994	65	67	2336	34.86	4.94	42.3
28	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	2012-2022	121	141	4951	35.11	5.08	41.4
29	Hardik Pandya	2016-2025	94	91	3231	35.50	5.60	38.0
30	Praveen Kumar	2007-2012	68	77	2774	36.02	5.13	42.1
31	Ravi Shastri	1981-1992	150	129	4650	36.04	4.21	51.2
32	Sunil Joshi	1996-2001	69	69	2509	36.36	4.44	49.0
33	Ravindra Jadeja	2009-2026	210	232	8478	36.54	4.88	44.8
34	Sourav Ganguly	1992-2007	308	100	3835	38.35	5.06	45.4
35	Yuvraj Singh	2000-2017	301	110	4227	38.42	5.08	45.3
36	Virender Sehwag	1999-2013	241	94	3737	39.75	5.22	45.6
37	Mohinder Amarnath	1975-1989	85	46	1971	42.84	4.33	59.3
38	Robin Singh	1989-2001	136	69	2985	43.26	4.79	54.1
39	Sachin Tendulkar	1989-2012	463	154	6850	44.48	5.10	52.2
40	Suresh Raina	2005-2018	226	36	1811	50.30	5.11	59.0

Why the modern bowlers own the top

An average is runs divided by wickets, and only one of those two terms has got harder over the life of the format. India bowlers in the 2010-onwards group on this page concede 5.16 an over; the group that debuted before 1990 conceded 4.34. On runs alone the modern bowler should look far worse.

He does not, because the wicket column moved further. The pre-1990 group needed 46.5 balls a wicket. The post-2010 group needs 33.9. Field restrictions, two new balls, free hits and a batting culture that treats a dot ball as a defeat have made scoring easier and survival harder at the same time, and the second effect is the larger of the two.

That is why Kapil Dev, sixth on this page at 27.45, is first by a distance on India's best ODI economy rates — and why Mohammed Shami, second here, is 36th of 40 on that same economy list while sitting first on India's best ODI bowling strike rates.

Pace, spin and the part-timers

Group	Bowlers	Wickets	Ave	Econ	SR
Specialist seam	21	3,125	29.54	4.85	36.6
Specialist spin	11	1,709	32.31	4.55	42.6
Batting all-rounders and part-timers	8	700	40.92	5.07	48.5

India's specialist seamers average nearly three runs a wicket better than its specialist spinners across the qualifying set, and take a wicket seven balls sooner. The spinners are the cheaper group by 30 runs per hundred balls. Neither of those facts is a judgement on individuals; it is a description of two jobs, one of which was for decades defined as bowling ten overs for 40 in the middle of an innings.

The third row is the one worth pausing on. Eight of the forty qualifiers are batters who bowled — Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh, Suresh Raina, Mohinder Amarnath, Robin Singh and Hardik Pandya — and between them they delivered enough balls to qualify and took 700 wickets. India used part-time bowling more heavily than most sides of the era, partly by design and partly because the fifth bowler's overs had to come from somewhere.

The four bowlers under 26

Bumrah, Shami and Siraj are the only India bowlers who qualify for this page with an average under 26, and Kuldeep Yadav at 27.04 is the only spinner in the top four. All four were selected into a side that could afford to attack, which earlier India teams frequently could not.

Jasprit Bumrah is the outlier on shape as well as on number. He heads the average list while also sitting thirteenth on economy and fourth on strike rate — the only bowler in the top five on averages who is also in the top half on runs conceded. Nobody else on this page is in the top fifteen of all three columns.

Shami's route is the opposite. He has the best strike rate of the forty at 25.8 balls a wicket and the fifth-worst economy at 5.58, and the two very nearly cancel. He bowls with the new ball and at the death, the two phases where wickets and runs both arrive fastest.

Mohammed Siraj has the smallest qualifying sample in the top ten at 2,251 balls, which is just above the bar. His 25.32 should be read with that in mind; a poor twelve months would move it more than it would move Kumble's.

What the bottom of the table is measuring

The last seven rows all belong to batters or all-rounders except Sunil Joshi and Ravindra Jadeja, and Jadeja's 36.54 is the highest average of any India bowler with 200 ODI wickets. He has taken more one-day wickets for India than all but six bowlers, at a cost that would look poor on any other list.

The explanation is the same one that produces his economy of 4.88: he has bowled the middle overs of one-day innings for fifteen years, in a role that is measured by what did not happen. A left-arm spinner asked to bowl ten overs for 45 on a flat surface is not being asked to average 28.

Averages, in other words, describe a job as much as a bowler. That is worth remembering before comparing anyone on this page to anyone else on it. The wider context sits in the ODI history guide, and career records for every name here are in the player directory and across the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Wickets, runs conceded, balls bowled, averages, economy rates and strike rates come from ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru career query for men's ODIs with the team filter set to India, read as a career bowling table and then re-sorted here by average. Statsguru presents the same forty-player qualifying set used on this site's economy and strike-rate pages, so the three lists rank identical rows on different columns.

The 2,000-ball qualification is a threshold chosen for this page rather than one Statsguru applies by default. It is set where it is because averages become unstable below roughly fifty wickets, and because a lower bar would admit careers of a dozen matches above bowlers with 300 wickets. Forty India players clear it.

The group averages in the pace-and-spin table are aggregate figures, computed here by summing runs, wickets and balls within each group rather than by averaging the individual averages. The three groups are assigned by each player's principal role across his ODI career, which is a judgement rather than a data field: Hardik Pandya and Robin Singh in particular could reasonably be placed in either the seam or the all-rounder row.

Every figure on this page was read in the final week of August 2026 and covers men's one-day internationals completed by then. Bumrah, Siraj, Kuldeep Yadav, Axar Patel and Ravindra Jadeja were still adding to their records at that point.