India ODI most maiden overs: All-Time Records

Kapil Dev bowled 235 maiden overs in one-day internationals for India. Javagal Srinath is second on 137, Zaheer Khan third on 112 and Anil Kumble fourth on 109. The gap between first and second is 98 maidens, which is the largest margin at the head of any of India's career bowling lists.

Volume explains part of it and rate explains the rest. Kapil bowled 1,867 overs and 12.6 in every hundred were maidens. Srinath bowled slightly more, 1,989, and managed 6.9 per hundred. Kumble bowled 2,396 overs, the most by any India bowler in the format, for 4.5 per hundred. Nobody who has bowled more than 500 overs for India has come within four maidens per hundred of Kapil's rate.

A maiden in a fifty-over international is now close to an accident. Bhuvneshwar Kumar retired in 2022 with 68 from 974 overs; Kuldeep Yadav has 31 from 1,034. The trend on this page is steeper and cleaner than on any other India bowling record, because a scoreless over is the single thing modern one-day batting is organised to prevent.

Maiden overs for India in ODIs

Rank	Bowler	Span	Mat	Overs	Mdns	Per 100 overs	Econ
1	Kapil Dev	1978-1994	225	1867	235	12.6	3.71
2	Javagal Srinath	1991-2003	229	1989.1	137	6.9	4.44
3	Zaheer Khan	2000-2012	194	1635.5	112	6.8	4.95
4	Anil Kumble	1990-2007	269	2396	109	4.5	4.29
5	Ajit Agarkar	1998-2007	191	1580.4	100	6.3	5.07
6	Harbhajan Singh	1998-2015	234	2059.5	83	4.0	4.30
7	Venkatesh Prasad	1994-2001	161	1354.5	79	5.8	4.67
8	Manoj Prabhakar	1984-1996	130	1060	76	7.2	4.27
9	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	2012-2022	121	974.3	68	7.0	5.08
10	Ravindra Jadeja	2009-2026	210	1734	59	3.4	4.88
11	Jasprit Bumrah	2016-2026	91	782.2	57	7.3	4.58
12	Ravi Shastri	1981-1992	150	1102.1	56	5.1	4.21
=13	Ashish Nehra	2001-2011	117	939.3	53	5.6	5.21
=13	Irfan Pathan	2004-2012	120	975.5	53	5.4	5.26
15	Mohammed Shami	2013-2025	108	887.4	52	5.9	5.58
16	Praveen Kumar	2007-2012	68	540.2	45	8.3	5.13
17	Madan Lal	1974-1987	67	527.2	44	8.3	4.05
18	Munaf Patel	2006-2011	70	525.4	38	7.2	4.95
=19	Ravichandran Ashwin	2010-2023	116	1050.3	37	3.5	4.93
=19	Roger Binny	1980-1987	72	492.5	37	7.5	4.58
21	Mohammed Siraj	2019-2026	50	375.1	34	9.1	5.13
=22	Sunil Joshi	1996-2001	69	564.2	33	5.8	4.44
=22	Maninder Singh	1983-1993	59	522.1	33	6.3	3.95
=24	Kuldeep Yadav	2017-2026	121	1034	31	3.0	5.07
=24	RP Singh	2005-2011	58	427.3	31	7.3	5.48

What Kapil's 235 rests on

Kapil Dev opened the bowling in almost every one of his 221 one-day innings and did it in an era when an opening batter's first instinct against a new ball was to survive it. He bowled a full length at or just outside off stump, moved the ball away, and set two slips for it. Against that, a top order looking to be four down for 60 rather than 90 played out overs, and a maiden was a normal outcome rather than a triumph.

Of the 235, seventy-two were bowled in India and 163 abroad or at neutral venues, which is the widest home-away split of anyone in the top twenty and reflects both his fixture list and the flatness of Indian one-day pitches.

He also appears eight times in the twenty most maiden-rich single innings India have bowled, which is more than any other bowler by a distance: Javagal Srinath appears three times and Bishan Bedi twice.

The most maidens in one India ODI innings

Bowler	Overs	Mdns	Runs	Wkts	Opponent	Venue	Date
Bishan Bedi	12.0	8	6	1	East Africa	Leeds	11 Jun 1975
Bishan Bedi	12.0	6	28	1	New Zealand	Manchester	14 Jun 1975
Kapil Dev	8.0	6	9	1	Sri Lanka	Amritsar	12 Sep 1982
Maninder Singh	9.0	6	9	1	Bangladesh	Chattogram	27 Oct 1988
Sunil Joshi	10.0	6	6	5	South Africa	Nairobi (Gymkhana)	26 Sep 1999
Syed Abid Ali	12.0	5	22	2	East Africa	Leeds	11 Jun 1975
Kapil Dev	9.0	5	15	1	Australia	Sydney	8 Jan 1981
Ravi Shastri	10.0	5	17	2	Pakistan	Sharjah	22 Mar 1985
Venkatesh Prasad	10.0	5	21	2	South Africa	Nairobi (Gymkhana)	3 Oct 1999
Srinivas Venkataraghavan	12.0	4	29	0	East Africa	Leeds	11 Jun 1975

Bishan Bedi's analysis of 12-8-6-1 against East Africa at Headingley on 11 June 1975 is the most economical spell of ten overs or more in India's one-day history and among the tightest in the men's game anywhere: six runs from seventy-two deliveries, at 0.50 an over. It came in India's first World Cup win, and the first ten-wicket victory in one-day international cricket.

Sunil Joshi's 10-6-6-5 at Nairobi in 1999 is the only entry in the top ten that also took five wickets, and it is the cheapest five-wicket haul India have recorded — the dated list is on the India ODI most five wicket hauls page.

One afternoon at Headingley

Three of the ten innings above came in the same match. India bowled 60 overs against East Africa on 11 June 1975 and Bedi, Syed Abid Ali and Srinivas Venkataraghavan bowled seventeen maidens between them out of 36 overs. Madan Lal and Mohinder Amarnath filled in the rest.

That is a period artefact rather than a feat that can be repeated. World Cup matches in 1975 and 1979 were sixty overs long, so a bowler could deliver twelve, and East Africa were an associate side of club standard playing their fourth match at that level. Nothing in the modern format allows an over count that high or an opposition that far below the standard of the fixture.

Home, away and the pitch effect

Restricted to matches in India, the leading maiden counts are Kapil Dev 72, Srinath 41, Agarkar 34, Zaheer Khan 31 and Manoj Prabhakar 31. In away and neutral fixtures the order is Kapil Dev 163, Srinath 96, Zaheer Khan 81, Anil Kumble 80 and Agarkar 66.

Every leading bowler on this page has bowled more maidens abroad than at home, and the ratios are steep: Srinath's split is 41 to 96, Kumble's 29 to 80, Venkatesh Prasad's 19 to 60. Some of that is fixture volume, because India have played roughly two-thirds of their one-day cricket away from home. But the residual is the pitch. A dry, true surface with short square boundaries and two new balls produces very few scoreless overs, whatever the bowler does.

Who still bowls maidens

Mohammed Siraj's 34 maidens from 375 overs — 9.1 per hundred — is the highest rate of any bowler on the page who debuted after 2000, and it is higher than Srinath's or Zaheer's. Jasprit Bumrah is close behind at 7.3, and Bhuvneshwar Kumar finished on 7.0.

All three are new-ball bowlers with a full length and a wobble or a seam position rather than pace alone, and all three bowl the first ten overs when a fielding side still has men in the ring by law rather than by choice. That is where the maiden survives. Once the field spreads, it disappears: Kuldeep Yadav at 3.0 per hundred and Ravindra Jadeja at 3.4 are the lowest rates in the top twenty-five, and both bowl the middle overs.

Four observations

Praveen Kumar and Madan Lal share the second-highest rate on the page at 8.3 maidens per hundred overs, separated by thirty years and about 25 kph. Both bowled at 120 to 130 kph with movement and no intention of surprising anyone, which turns out to be the maiden-producing method in every era.

Harbhajan Singh bowled 2,059 overs, the second-largest volume of any India bowler in the format, and produced 83 maidens at 4.0 per hundred. Kumble bowled 2,396 for 109 at 4.5. Spinners who are asked to keep the run rate at four and a half rather than to stop it dead accumulate very few scoreless overs, which is why the India ODI best economy rate list flatters both men and this one does not.

Nobody in the top ten of this page debuted after 2016, and only three of the top twenty-five did. On current rates it would take a bowler around 1,900 overs of new-ball work to reach 235 maidens, which is more overs than any India seamer has bowled in the format.

Only five bowlers have taken six or more maidens in an India ODI innings, and four of the five occasions came before 1990. The one exception is Joshi's spell at Nairobi. Both the spin bowling tradition page and the history of one-day cricket in India page track the change in what a captain asks a bowler to do, and the cricket in India hub frames the rest.

Sources and method

Maiden totals, overs bowled and economy figures come from ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru, restricted to India men's one-day internationals and consulted in August 2026. The career table uses Statsguru's bowling career records; the single-innings table uses its innings-level view ordered by maidens; the home and away figures use the same records split by venue, with neutral grounds counted alongside away.

Maidens per hundred overs is calculated on this page: maidens divided by overs bowled, multiplied by a hundred, with part-overs converted to decimal overs first. It is rounded to one decimal place. Statsguru does not publish this rate, and it is included because a raw maiden count rewards nothing but longevity.

The table stops at 31 maidens because below that the list fills with bowlers of twenty or thirty matches whose totals reflect a handful of new-ball spells. Statements about length, field settings and what a batting side was trying to do are description, not measurement. Kapil Dev's total is settled; the figures for Bumrah, Siraj, Kuldeep Yadav and Jadeja will move while they are still selected.

The five maiden-rich spells from the 1975 World Cup are recorded against 60-over matches, in which a bowler was permitted twelve overs. Comparing them with a modern ten-over allocation overstates them, and this page says so rather than ranking them without comment. The player directory has the careers behind the names.