India ODI most sixes: All-Time Records

Rohit Sharma has hit 369 sixes in One-Day Internationals for India. MS Dhoni is second on 222, which means the 147-six gap between first and second is larger than the entire career tally of every Indian outside the top six. Rohit is also past the 351 that Shahid Afridi finished with, the previous benchmark for the format.

Sachin Tendulkar is third on 195 and Sourav Ganguly fourth on 189, both from far more deliveries than Rohit has faced. That is the tension the page has to resolve: a six count rewards longevity as much as method, and Tendulkar faced 21,368 balls to Rohit's 12,784.

So the ranking by count comes first, because that is the record people look for, and a rate table follows it. The two lists share only four names in their top ten.

The 25 leading six-hitters for India in ODIs

#	Player	Span	Inns	Balls faced	Sixes	Balls per six
1	Rohit Sharma	2007-2026	280	12,784	369	34.6
2	MS Dhoni	2004-2019	294	12,164	222	54.8
3	Sachin Tendulkar	1989-2012	452	21,368	195	109.6
4	Sourav Ganguly	1992-2007	297	15,235	189	80.6
5	Virat Kohli	2008-2026	302	15,903	171	93.0
6	Yuvraj Singh	2000-2017	275	9,846	153	64.4
7	Virender Sehwag	1999-2013	235	7,655	131	58.4
8	Suresh Raina	2005-2018	194	6,005	120	50.0
9	Ajay Jadeja	1992-2000	179	7,678	85	90.3
10	Shikhar Dhawan	2010-2022	164	7,436	79	94.1
11	KL Rahul	2016-2026	90	3,746	79	47.4
12	Shreyas Iyer	2017-2026	76	3,205	78	41.1
13	Mohammad Azharuddin	1985-2000	308	12,669	77+	—
14	Hardik Pandya	2016-2025	68	1,717	76	22.6
15	Shubman Gill	2019-2026	66	3,347	69	48.5
16	Kapil Dev	1978-1994	198	3,979	67+	—
17	Ravindra Jadeja	2009-2026	142	3,396	55	61.7
18	Navjot Singh Sidhu	1987-1998	127	6,329	44	143.8
19	Yusuf Pathan	2008-2012	41	713	43	16.6
20	Rahul Dravid	1996-2011	314	15,127	42	360.2
21	Ishan Kishan	2021-2026	28	1,034	41	25.2
22	Robin Singh	1989-2001	113	3,144	41+	—
23	Kris Srikkanth	1981-1992	145	5,702	41+	—
24	Irfan Pathan	2004-2012	87	1,941	37	52.5
25	Harbhajan Singh	1998-2015	126	1,502	34	44.2

A plus sign means ESPNcricinfo's ball-by-ball record is incomplete for part of that career, so the true figure is higher than the number shown. That affects the four pre-2001 entries and is the reason no balls-per-six figure is given for them: a rate built on an incomplete numerator would be wrong in a way the count merely is not.

Balls per six, with a 700-ball floor

Player	Sixes	Balls faced	Balls per six
Yusuf Pathan	43	713	16.6
Hardik Pandya	76	1,717	22.6
Ishan Kishan	41	1,034	25.2
Rohit Sharma	369	12,784	34.6
Shreyas Iyer	78	3,205	41.1
Harbhajan Singh	34	1,502	44.2
KL Rahul	79	3,746	47.4
Shubman Gill	69	3,347	48.5
Suresh Raina	120	6,005	50.0
Irfan Pathan	37	1,941	52.5
MS Dhoni	222	12,164	54.8
Virender Sehwag	131	7,655	58.4
Ravindra Jadeja	55	3,396	61.7
Yuvraj Singh	153	9,846	64.4
Sourav Ganguly	189	15,235	80.6
Ajay Jadeja	85	7,678	90.3
Virat Kohli	171	15,903	93.0
Shikhar Dhawan	79	7,436	94.1
Sachin Tendulkar	195	21,368	109.6
Navjot Singh Sidhu	44	6,329	143.8
Rahul Dravid	42	15,127	360.2

The floor is 700 balls faced, set there because Yusuf Pathan faced 713 and his record is the point of the table. He hit a six every 16.6 balls across 41 ODI innings — a rate no Indian with a longer career has come close to — and averaged 27.00 doing it. The method produced 43 sixes and 810 runs in total.

Hardik Pandya at 22.6 and Ishan Kishan at 25.2 follow. Then Rohit Sharma at 34.6, which is the genuinely remarkable line on the page: nobody else has sustained a rate under 40 across more than 4,000 deliveries, and Rohit has done it across 12,784.

The Dravid line

Rahul Dravid faced 15,127 balls in ODI cricket and hit 42 sixes. One every 360 deliveries, or roughly one every seven innings. He is on this list only because he batted 314 times.

That is not a criticism of the record; it is a description of a role that no longer exists. Dravid's job at three was to be there in the fortieth over, and India's totals in his era were built on strike rotation rather than clearing the rope. The comparison with Shreyas Iyer — 78 sixes from 3,205 balls, a rate nine times faster — is a comparison of two entirely different sets of instructions given to a number three.

Sixes at home and away

Player	Home sixes	Home balls per six	Away/neutral sixes	Away/neutral balls per six
Rohit Sharma	193	26.1	176	44.1
MS Dhoni	116	40.9	106	69.9
Virat Kohli	95	74.0	76	116.7
Sachin Tendulkar	71	111.2	124	108.7
Yuvraj Singh	63	60.0	90	67.4
Sourav Ganguly	57	70.4	132	85.0
Shreyas Iyer	51	31.7	27	58.9
Virender Sehwag	47	58.8	84	58.2
Shubman Gill	46	36.5	23	72.5
KL Rahul	43	42.9	36	52.8
Suresh Raina	42	53.0	78	48.5
Hardik Pandya	36	20.0	40	25.0

Rohit has hit 52% of his ODI sixes in India off 39% of his ODI deliveries. A six every 26.1 balls at home against every 44.1 abroad is the widest home-and-away gap of anyone in the group, and it is not a small effect — it is close to a doubling.

Two players show almost no venue effect at all. Tendulkar's rates are 111.2 at home and 108.7 away; Virender Sehwag's are 58.8 and 58.2. Both were flat-bat hitters through the line rather than pull-and-loft players, and neither seems to have needed a short square boundary to score that way. Gill's split, 36.5 against 72.5, is the opposite case on a much smaller sample.

The four records that are incomplete

Mohammad Azharuddin, Kapil Dev, Robin Singh and Kris Srikkanth appear with a plus sign against their six counts. ESPNcricinfo holds ball-by-ball detail for most but not all matches played before the early 2000s, and where a scorecard survives only as a summary the boundary breakdown for that innings is missing. The figure shown is what the available innings add up to.

The practical effect is small for the ranking and large for the rate. Kapil Dev struck at 95.07 across 3,979 recorded deliveries, a figure no other Indian of his generation approached, and 67 confirmed sixes at that volume implies a rate somewhere near 59 balls per six — but the missing innings could move that in either direction, so the table leaves the cell empty rather than guessing. Azharuddin's case is the same in reverse: a low six count for a batter who scored 9,378 runs, and no way to be certain how low.

Anyone comparing pre-2001 and post-2011 six-hitting should treat the older numbers as a floor rather than a total. That caveat does not apply to the fours column on these careers to the same degree, because the missing innings are the same in both cases but fours are far more numerous, so a handful of absent innings shifts the percentage less.

What changed between 1996 and 2016

Fourteen of the 25 names retired before 2019 and eleven of those played the bulk of their ODI careers before 2010. Their rates cluster between 58 and 144 balls per six. Every player on the list whose career began after 2014 — Pandya, Rahul, Iyer, Gill, Kishan — sits between 22 and 49.

Two changes account for most of that. Fielding restrictions were revised repeatedly through the 2010s and the number of overs with a fielder outside the circle limit fell, and two new balls from 2011 meant less help for the bowler in the final ten. The consequence for team scores rather than individuals is set out on the page for India's highest ODI team totals, and the format's arc in the country is traced in the guide to India's ODI cricket history.

Four observations

Ravindra Jadeja has 55 ODI sixes and no hundreds. He is the only man in the top twenty with a six count above fifty and a highest score under 90.

MS Dhoni's 222 sixes came in 294 innings of which 83 ended not out. A finisher's six count is inflated relative to his balls faced by the structure of the job — he arrives when the bowler is defending a boundary — and his 54.8 balls per six is the best of anyone on the list who faced more than 9,000 deliveries other than Rohit.

Suresh Raina hit 120 ODI sixes without ever making a hundred in India. His away rate, 48.5 balls per six, is better than his home rate of 53.0, which is unusual and is the reverse of every other middle-order batter here.

The count list and the rate list disagree about eight of their top ten places. Sixes are the boundary statistic most distorted by career length, far more than fours, which is why the companion page on India's most ODI fours produces a more stable ranking. The scoring-rate view of the same careers is on the page for India's best ODI strike rates, and every profile is listed in the player directory alongside the wider cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Six counts, balls faced, innings and career spans are from ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru career query for men's ODIs with the team filter set to India, ordered by boundary sixes. Home figures come from the identical query with the venue filter set to home; away and neutral figures are the career line minus the home line, computed here rather than quoted.

Balls per six is balls faced divided by sixes. It is not a published statistic and it has a real weakness: balls faced includes every ball the batter played, so a batter who spent long periods rebuilding is penalised for it. The alternative — sixes per boundary, or sixes as a share of runs — flatters a slogger with a low aggregate, so this page uses the balls measure and states the limitation instead of hiding it.

The qualification floor for the rate table is 700 balls faced. Four careers that began before 2001 carry a plus sign on the six count because ESPNcricinfo does not hold complete ball-by-ball data for every match they played; no rate is calculated for those, and their true counts are higher than shown. Everything here was read from Statsguru in the last days of August 2026 and covers men's ODIs completed by that date.