India Test most maiden overs: All-Time Records

Anil Kumble bowled 40,850 deliveries in Test cricket for India and 1,576 of his overs went for nothing. That is 480 more maidens than Bishan Singh Bedi in second place and it is a straightforward consequence of volume: nobody else in India's history has bowled anything close to Kumble's number of overs.

Volume is why the raw total is the less interesting of the two tables on this page. The share table — maidens as a proportion of overs delivered — puts Bapu Nadkarni at 43.5 per cent, meaning roughly two of every five overs he bowled for India produced no run at all. Kumble's share is 23.1 per cent. Both figures are true and they describe entirely different bowlers.

A maiden over is also the most era-dependent number in cricket. Test scoring rates have risen by more than half a run an over since the 1960s, over rates have fallen, and a modern bowler simply has fewer opportunities. Read every row below alongside its span column.

Most maiden overs for India in Tests

Rank	Player	Span	Balls	Maidens	Wickets	Economy
1	Anil Kumble	1990-2008	40,850	1,576	619	2.69
2	Bishan Singh Bedi	1966-1979	21,364	1,096	266	2.14
3	Kapil Dev	1978-1994	27,740	1,060	434	2.78
4	Ravichandran Ashwin	2011-2024	27,246	907	537	2.83
5	Harbhajan Singh	1998-2015	28,580	871	417	2.84
6	Ravindra Jadeja	2012-2026	20,832	784	355	2.59
7	Vinoo Mankad	1946-1959	14,686	777	162	2.13
8	Srinivas Venkataraghavan	1965-1983	14,877	696	156	2.27
9	Bapu Nadkarni	1955-1968	9,165	665	88	1.67
10	Ravi Shastri	1981-1992	15,751	657	151	2.35
11	Ishant Sharma	2007-2021	19,160	640	311	3.15
12	Zaheer Khan	2000-2014	18,785	624	311	3.27
13	Subhash Gupte	1951-1961	11,284	608	149	2.34
14	Erapalli Prasanna	1962-1978	14,353	602	189	2.40
15	Javagal Srinath	1991-2002	15,104	599	236	2.85
16	Bhagwath Chandrasekhar	1964-1979	15,963	584	242	2.70
17	Dilip Doshi	1979-1983	9,322	456	114	2.25
18	Jasprit Bumrah	2018-2025	10,031	396	234	2.77
19	Mohammed Shami	2013-2023	11,515	364	229	3.30
20	Venkatapathy Raju	1990-2001	7,602	362	93	2.25
21	Maninder Singh	1982-1993	8,218	359	88	2.40
22	Shivlal Yadav	1979-1987	8,360	339	102	2.56
23	Salim Durani	1960-1973	6,446	317	75	2.47
24	Pragyan Ojha	2009-2013	7,633	298	113	2.68
25	Dattu Phadkar	1947-1959	5,994	277	62	2.28
26	Venkatesh Prasad	1996-2001	7,041	275	96	2.86
27	Manoj Prabhakar	1984-1995	7,475	274	96	2.87
28	Polly Umrigar	1948-1962	4,725	262	35	1.87
29	Gulabrai Ramchand	1952-1960	4,976	256	41	2.28
30	Ghulam Ahmed	1948-1959	5,650	254	68	2.17

Nadkarni's 665 from 1,527 overs

Bapu Nadkarni played 41 Tests between 1955 and 1968, bowled the equivalent of 1,527 six-ball overs and made 665 of them maidens. No other India bowler has been that difficult to score off across a career of any length.

The single innings that made his reputation came against England at Chennai in January 1964: 32 overs, 27 maidens, five runs, no wicket, including twenty-one consecutive maiden overs and 131 balls without a run conceded. That sequence is still the longest run-free spell in Test cricket. The fixture that produced it is documented on the India versus England Test record page.

Nadkarni took 88 wickets in those 41 Tests, which is why he does not appear on India's wicket-taking lists at all and why his name is unfamiliar to anyone who came to the game after 1980. He was employed to stop runs while somebody else took wickets, and the maiden column is the only place in the record where that job is visible.

Maidens as a share of overs bowled

Player	Overs	Maidens	Maiden share
Bapu Nadkarni	1,527.3	665	43.5%
Polly Umrigar	787.3	262	33.3%
Subhash Gupte	1,880.4	608	32.3%
Vinoo Mankad	2,447.4	777	31.7%
Gulabrai Ramchand	829.1	256	30.9%
Bishan Singh Bedi	3,560.4	1,096	30.8%
Salim Durani	1,074.2	317	29.5%
Dilip Doshi	1,553.4	456	29.4%
Venkatapathy Raju	1,267.0	362	28.6%
Srinivas Venkataraghavan	2,479.3	696	28.1%
Dattu Phadkar	999.0	277	27.7%
Ghulam Ahmed	941.4	254	27.0%
Maninder Singh	1,369.4	359	26.2%
Erapalli Prasanna	2,392.1	602	25.2%
Ravi Shastri	2,625.1	657	25.0%
Shivlal Yadav	1,393.2	339	24.3%
Javagal Srinath	2,517.2	599	23.8%
Jasprit Bumrah	1,671.5	396	23.7%
Pragyan Ojha	1,272.1	298	23.4%
Anil Kumble	6,808.2	1,576	23.1%
Kapil Dev	4,623.2	1,060	22.9%
Ravindra Jadeja	3,472.0	784	22.6%
Bhagwath Chandrasekhar	2,660.3	584	22.0%
Ravichandran Ashwin	4,541.0	907	20.0%
Ishant Sharma	3,193.3	640	20.0%
Zaheer Khan	3,130.5	624	19.9%
Mohammed Shami	1,919.1	364	19.0%
Harbhajan Singh	4,763.2	871	18.3%

One caveat matters here. Statsguru records deliveries rather than overs, and the overs column is a six-ball conversion of the balls figure, but a handful of the older matches in this set — India's tours of Australia in 1967-68 and 1977-78, and their earlier tours of England — were played with overs of eight or five balls. Maidens in an eight-ball over are harder to bowl and were counted as one over each, so the shares for Mankad, Gupte, Umrigar, Ramchand and Nadkarni are slightly understated rather than overstated. The direction of the error is known; its size is not, which is why it is flagged rather than silently corrected.

Where the maidens were bowled

Player	Maidens in India	Career maidens
Anil Kumble	895	1,576
Bishan Singh Bedi	649	1,096
Ravichandran Ashwin	614	907
Harbhajan Singh	565	871
Ravindra Jadeja	548	784
Kapil Dev	467	1,060
Srinivas Venkataraghavan	463	696
Vinoo Mankad	416	777
Bhagwath Chandrasekhar	408	584
Subhash Gupte	352	608
Erapalli Prasanna	345	602
Ravi Shastri	325	657
Dilip Doshi	292	456
Pragyan Ojha	262	298
Zaheer Khan	258	624
Ishant Sharma	256	640
Mohammed Shami	114	364
Jasprit Bumrah	98	396

The balance in each row was bowled abroad or at a neutral venue. Ravindra Jadeja has bowled 70 per cent of his maidens in India and Pragyan Ojha 88 per cent; Jasprit Bumrah has bowled 25 per cent of his at home, and Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma around 40 per cent each. The pattern matches the wicket-taking splits set out on the India Test best economy rate page: spinners built their records in India, seamers abroad.

Kumble's 1,576 and the price of bowling everything

Anil Kumble bowled 6,808 overs for India in Tests. The next name on that particular list, Harbhajan Singh, bowled 4,763. Kumble's maiden total is a function of that gap, and his maiden share of 23.1 per cent is only twentieth on this page.

He was not a containing bowler in intention. He bowled fast for a leg-spinner, attacked the stumps, and took 619 wickets. The 1,576 maidens are what happens when a bowler of that description is asked to deliver a third of a country's overs for eighteen years, and the figure will very probably stand for a long time: India have not played four spinners since the 1970s and no current bowler is on a trajectory to bowl 40,000 deliveries.

Fast bowlers and maidens

Kapil Dev's 1,060 is third on the list overall and by a long way the most by any India fast bowler — 420 more than Ishant Sharma, who is next. Kapil bowled 4,623 overs, more than any Indian seamer before or since, in an era when the front-line quick was also the only front-line quick.

Srinath at 23.8 per cent and Bumrah at 23.7 have the highest maiden shares among India's fast bowlers, and both figures are within a point of Kumble's. That is a notable equivalence: a fast bowler who bowls a maiden almost a quarter of the time is doing something very different from a spinner achieving the same rate, because he is doing it with a field spread for the drive and a batter willing to leave.

At the other end, Harbhajan Singh's 18.3 per cent is the lowest share of anyone in the top thirty. He bowled a lot of overs in the 2000s to batters who had been coached to use their feet against off-spin, and the maiden column registers that.

Four observations

Every one of the ten highest maiden shares belongs to a bowler who had finished playing by 2001, and eight of the ten by 1983. Nothing about modern bowling has become less accurate; scoring rates and field restrictions in the wider game have changed what an accurate over looks like on a scorecard. Surfaces are part of it too, and the pitch types and conditions page covers how Indian grounds have behaved across the period.

Three of the top thirty were not specialist bowlers. Polly Umrigar, Gulabrai Ramchand and Salim Durani all batted in the top six and between them bowled 866 maidens, which says more about how India constructed a side before 1970 than about their bowling.

The most maidens by anyone still playing is Ravindra Jadeja's 784, and he is the only active bowler in the top ten. Ravichandran Ashwin's 907 is the most by anyone whose career began this century apart from Kumble and Harbhajan.

Bedi's 30.8 per cent from 3,560 overs is the most impressive figure on the page once volume is taken into account. Nadkarni's share is higher but from less than half the workload; nobody who has bowled more than 3,000 overs for India has come within four percentage points of Bedi. The tradition he belonged to is set out on the spin bowling tradition page.

Sources and method

Maiden totals, balls bowled, wickets and economy rates come from ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru, filtered to India men's Test matches, with the maiden column returned when it is used as the sort key. Home figures use Statsguru's venue classification; the away balance quoted in the text is the career total minus the home figure and therefore includes any maidens bowled at neutral venues.

The overs column throughout is balls divided by six, and the caveat about eight-ball overs in some older matches is set out in full above rather than buried. Nadkarni's twenty-one consecutive maidens at Chennai in 1964 comes from the published scorecard for that Test.

The bowlers named here are indexed at the player directory; the wider setting is at the cricket in India hub and on the history of Test cricket in India page. Figures were checked in August 2026.