India ODI fastest hundred: All-Time Records

Virat Kohli reached a hundred off 52 balls against Australia at Jaipur on 16 October 2013. He finished unbeaten on 100 with eight fours and seven sixes, and India chased 360 with 39 deliveries to spare, winning by nine wickets.

The record he took was Virender Sehwag's 60-ball hundred at Hamilton in March 2009, which had itself replaced a mark set by Mohammad Azharuddin in 1988. Three names have held this record in nearly forty years of India playing the format, which is a slower rate of turnover than most one-day records manage.

What makes the Jaipur innings unusual is the match situation. Most of the fastest hundreds on this list were made in innings that were already comfortable; Kohli's was made chasing 360, a target India had never previously reached, against an attack bowling to a set field.

The fastest ODI hundreds for India

#	Batter	Balls to 100	Opponent	Venue	Year
1	Virat Kohli	52	Australia	Jaipur	2013
2	Virender Sehwag	60	New Zealand	Hamilton	2009
3	Virat Kohli	61	Australia	Nagpur	2013
=4	Mohammad Azharuddin	62	New Zealand	Baroda	1988
=4	KL Rahul	62	Netherlands	Bengaluru	2023
6	Rohit Sharma	63	Afghanistan	Delhi	2023
7	Yuvraj Singh	64	England	Rajkot	2008
8	Kedar Jadhav	65	England	Pune	2017
=9	Suresh Raina	66	Hong Kong	Karachi	2008
=9	Virender Sehwag	66	Sri Lanka	Rajkot	2009

Ten innings by eight batters. Kohli and Sehwag appear twice each, and Kohli's two came within six weeks of one another in the autumn of 2013 against the same opponent.

The 2013 Australia series

Virat Kohli made a 52-ball hundred at Jaipur on 16 October 2013 and a 61-ball hundred at Nagpur on 30 October. They are first and third on this page, and they came in the same seven-match series against the same bowling attack.

That series produced totals of 383, 359, 362 and 350 in a fortnight, on pitches and with a fielding-restriction regime that made 350 a competitive rather than an exceptional score. Kohli's Jaipur innings closed a chase of 360; his Nagpur innings closed one of 351. Both were unbeaten, and India won both.

A record set in those conditions is sometimes discounted for that reason, which is a mistake. The bowling side had the same conditions, and nobody else in that series or since has done it in 52 balls. What the context does explain is why two of India's three fastest hundreds are dated within a fortnight of each other.

Azharuddin's 62 balls in 1988

Mohammad Azharuddin reached a hundred in 62 balls against New Zealand at Baroda in December 1988. It stood as India's fastest for over twenty years, and in the context of 1988 it is the most remarkable innings on this page.

India's par one-day total in the late 1980s was between 220 and 250, one ball was used for the full fifty overs, and the field restrictions that make modern six-hitting viable did not exist in the same form. A hundred in 62 balls in that environment required a scoring rate that the rest of the innings around him was not producing.

Azharuddin's career strike rate of 74.02 places him well down India's best ODI batting strike rates, which is another reminder that a fastest-hundred list records one innings rather than a habit. He was, by the standards of his own decade, one of the quickest scorers India had.

Openers and the middle order

Six of the ten innings were played by batters who came in at four or lower: both of Kohli's, Yuvraj Singh's at Rajkot, Kedar Jadhav's at Pune, Suresh Raina's at Karachi and Azharuddin's at Baroda. Four were played by openers — Virender Sehwag twice, KL Rahul and Rohit Sharma.

That split runs against the pattern on India's fastest ODI fifties, where the lower order dominates. The difference is arithmetic: a number eight can hit a 21-ball fifty in the overs he is given, but reaching a hundred takes long enough that only a batter arriving before roughly the thirtieth over has the deliveries available.

Sehwag's two — 60 balls at Hamilton in 2009 and 66 at Rajkot later the same year — are the only entries by a specialist opener facing a new ball. His Hamilton hundred came in a total of 392, which was then India's highest in the format.

How the record moved

Held by	Balls	Set	Stood for
Mohammad Azharuddin	62	Baroda, Dec 1988	just over 20 years
Virender Sehwag	60	Hamilton, Mar 2009	4 years, 7 months
Virat Kohli	52	Jaipur, Oct 2013	standing

Three holders in the whole of India's one-day history, and the first of them held it for two decades. Azharuddin's mark survived the arrival of Sachin Tendulkar, the entire Ganguly captaincy and India's 2003 World Cup final side without being seriously threatened.

Sehwag took two balls off it and held it for four and a half years. Kohli then took eight balls off Sehwag's figure in a single innings, which is the largest single improvement in the record's history and the reason it has not moved since.

The pattern is worth noting because it contradicts the assumption that batting records fall steadily as scoring rates rise. India's fastest hundred improved by ten balls across thirty-eight years, and eight of those ten came in one afternoon.

Where these innings were played

Seven of the ten were made in India, at Jaipur, Nagpur, Baroda, Bengaluru, Delhi, Rajkot and Pune. The three exceptions are Sehwag's at Hamilton, Raina's at Karachi and — counting Rajkot twice — nothing else outside the country at all.

That concentration is partly fixture volume and partly surface. India's home one-day grounds have for two decades produced the flattest pitches on the international circuit, and a batter attempting a 60-ball hundred needs a surface where the ball comes on at a predictable height.

The two innings played abroad are correspondingly the more difficult. Sehwag's 60 balls at Seddon Park came in New Zealand conditions where the new ball moves for longer, and it remained India's record for four years afterwards.

Only two grounds appear twice: Rajkot, which hosted Yuvraj Singh's 64-ball hundred against England in 2008 and Sehwag's 66-ball hundred against Sri Lanka in 2009 within fifteen months. Both were made batting first in totals above 380.

Four observations

Half the list comes from a nine-year window between 2008 and 2017, and only one innings has been added since. India's scoring rates have kept climbing, but the specific combination of a batter with fifty overs of licence and an attack unable to contain him has not become more frequent.

Three of the ten came against sides outside the top eight at the time — Hong Kong, Netherlands and Afghanistan. That proportion is lower than on most fast-scoring lists, and the two fastest innings on the page both came against Australia.

Kohli holds the record and has 54 ODI hundreds, the most by any Indian. Those two facts are less connected than they look: 52 of his hundreds took more than 61 balls, and the ranking by count is a different list entirely, on India's most ODI centuries.

Rohit Sharma has three ODI double hundreds and appears here once, at 63 balls. The batter with the highest individual score in the history of the format — 264 against Sri Lanka in 2014 — is sixth on this page, which is set out alongside the rest on India's highest ODI individual scores. Career records for all eight batters are in the player directory, and the wider format history in the ODI history guide and the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

The ball counts on this page were taken from published fastest-ODI-century records for India and each of the top three was confirmed independently against the scorecard or match report for that fixture. Where a compiled list gave a figure that a scorecard contradicted, the row was dropped rather than reconciled.

Balls to hundred counts deliveries faced up to and including the one that brought up three figures. It is not the strike rate of the completed innings: several of these batters went on, and Kohli's Jaipur hundred was also the end of his innings because the chase finished on it.

Years rather than full dates are given in the table because published sources for the older entries disagree on the exact day for two of them while agreeing on the match, and a wrong date is worse than a year. Kohli's Jaipur innings, dated in the opening paragraph, was verified to the day.

Batting positions described in the openers section reflect where each batter came in for that particular innings, not their usual place in the order, since Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul both batted elsewhere at other stages of their careers. All figures were checked in the final week of August 2026 and cover men's one-day internationals completed by that date.