Highest ODI Partnership for India: 331 & Top 25 List

Rahul Dravid batted at the second wicket twice in 1999 and both stands are still India's biggest. In May at Taunton he added 318 with Sourav Ganguly; in November at Hyderabad he added 331 with Sachin Tendulkar. No third Indian pair has reached 300 in the twenty-seven years since, and Dravid remains the only batter to have been at the crease for two three-hundred stands in one-day international cricket.

The Hyderabad stand sits at the top. Tendulkar finished on 186 not out, Dravid made 153, India posted 376 for 2 against New Zealand and won by 174 runs. It broke a record India themselves had set six months earlier at Taunton, where Ganguly's 183 off 158 balls and Dravid's 145 off 129 carried India to 373 for 6 in a World Cup group match Sri Lanka lost by 157 runs.

What follows is the full ranking down to 212, then the best stand for each of the ten wickets, then the sequence by which the team record climbed from 123 in 1975 to 331. The main table stops at 200 runs, which is where the list naturally thins.

India's twenty-five biggest ODI stands

#	Runs	Pair	Wkt	Opponent	Venue	Date
1	331	Sachin Tendulkar & Rahul Dravid	2nd	New Zealand	Hyderabad (Deccan)	8 Nov 1999
2	318	Sourav Ganguly & Rahul Dravid	2nd	Sri Lanka	Taunton	26 May 1999
3	290	Ishan Kishan & Virat Kohli	2nd	Bangladesh	Chattogram	10 Dec 2022
4	275*	Mohammad Azharuddin & Ajay Jadeja	4th	Zimbabwe	Cuttack	9 Apr 1998
5	258	Sourav Ganguly & Sachin Tendulkar	1st	Kenya	Paarl	24 Oct 2001
6	256	Yuvraj Singh & MS Dhoni	4th	England	Cuttack	19 Jan 2017
7	252	Sourav Ganguly & Sachin Tendulkar	1st	Sri Lanka	Colombo (RPS)	7 Jul 1998
8	246	Rohit Sharma & Virat Kohli	2nd	West Indies	Guwahati	21 Oct 2018
9	244	Sourav Ganguly & Sachin Tendulkar	2nd	Namibia	Pietermaritzburg	23 Feb 2003
10	237*	Sachin Tendulkar & Rahul Dravid	3rd	Kenya	Bristol	23 May 1999
11	236	Sourav Ganguly & Rahul Dravid	2nd	Sri Lanka	Nagpur	22 Mar 1999
12	233*	Virat Kohli & KL Rahul	3rd	Pakistan	Colombo (RPS)	10 Sep 2023
13	231	Sachin Tendulkar & Navjot Sidhu	2nd	Pakistan	Sharjah	15 Apr 1996
14	231	Shikhar Dhawan & Ajinkya Rahane	1st	Sri Lanka	Cuttack	2 Nov 2014
15	230	Rohit Sharma & Virat Kohli	2nd	New Zealand	Kanpur	29 Oct 2017
16	227	Rohit Sharma & KL Rahul	1st	West Indies	Visakhapatnam	18 Dec 2019
17	224	Gautam Gambhir & Virat Kohli	3rd	Sri Lanka	Eden Gardens	24 Dec 2009
18	224	Shubman Gill & Ishan Kishan	3rd	Afghanistan	Lucknow	17 Jun 2026
19	223*	Mohammad Azharuddin & Ajay Jadeja	5th	Sri Lanka	Colombo (RPS)	17 Aug 1997
20	221	Virender Sehwag & Yuvraj Singh	3rd	Sri Lanka	Colombo (RPS)	3 Feb 2009
21	219	Rohit Sharma & Virat Kohli	2nd	Sri Lanka	Colombo (RPS)	31 Aug 2017
22	213	VVS Laxman & Yuvraj Singh	4th	Australia	Sydney	22 Jan 2004
23	213	Virat Kohli & Ajinkya Rahane	3rd	Bangladesh	Fatullah	26 Feb 2014
24	213	Rohit Sharma & Shreyas Iyer	2nd	Sri Lanka	Mohali	13 Dec 2017
25	212	Shikhar Dhawan & Virat Kohli	2nd	Australia	Canberra	20 Jan 2016

An asterisk marks a stand that was unbroken when the innings ended.

The second wicket does most of the work

Eleven of those twenty-five came for the second wicket, six for the third, four for the first, three for the fourth and one for the fifth. Nothing from the sixth wicket down gets near the list. That distribution is not an accident of who happened to bat together: the second wicket is where an opener who has seen off the new ball meets a specialist batter with forty-odd overs left, and it is the only position in the order that reliably offers both a set player and enough time.

The pairs that recur are the obvious ones. Ganguly and Tendulkar appear three times, Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli three times, Azharuddin and Jadeja twice, and Dravid four times with three different partners. Kohli is in six of the twenty-five, more than anyone else. Tendulkar is in five across four partners, a reminder that he opened for most of his career and so had fewer chances at the second and third wicket than his run tally alone would suggest.

The best stand for each wicket

Wkt	Runs	Pair	Opponent	Venue	Date
1st	258	Sourav Ganguly & Sachin Tendulkar	Kenya	Paarl	24 Oct 2001
2nd	331	Sachin Tendulkar & Rahul Dravid	New Zealand	Hyderabad (Deccan)	8 Nov 1999
3rd	237*	Sachin Tendulkar & Rahul Dravid	Kenya	Bristol	23 May 1999
4th	275*	Mohammad Azharuddin & Ajay Jadeja	Zimbabwe	Cuttack	9 Apr 1998
5th	223*	Mohammad Azharuddin & Ajay Jadeja	Sri Lanka	Colombo (RPS)	17 Aug 1997
6th	160	Ambati Rayudu & Stuart Binny	Zimbabwe	Harare	10 Jul 2015
7th	125*	MS Dhoni & Ravichandran Ashwin	Pakistan	Chennai	30 Dec 2012
8th	100*	MS Dhoni & Bhuvneshwar Kumar	Sri Lanka	Pallekele	24 Aug 2017
9th	126*	Kapil Dev & Syed Kirmani	Zimbabwe	Tunbridge Wells	18 Jun 1983
10th	64	Lakshmipathy Balaji & Harbhajan Singh	England	The Oval	3 Sep 2004

The ninth row is the most interesting thing on the page. India's best ninth-wicket stand, 126 not out between Kapil Dev and Syed Kirmani at Tunbridge Wells in June 1983, is larger than their best seventh-wicket stand and larger than their best eighth. A record set in a World Cup group match in 1983, with India five down for 17 and Kapil Dev on his way to 175 not out, has outlasted forty-three years of specialist lower-middle-order batting.

The sixth wicket is where the column stops describing batting and starts describing rescue work. From 223 at the fifth to 160 at the sixth, and then nothing below the sixth has reached 130. Seven, eight and nine have been occupied for India by bowlers who bat and by wicketkeepers batting with bowlers, and the numbers reflect it.

How the record climbed from 123 to 331

Runs	Pair	Wkt	Opponent	Venue	Date
123*	Farokh Engineer & Sunil Gavaskar	1st	East Africa	Leeds	11 Jun 1975
134	Krishnamachari Srikkanth & Dilip Vengsarkar	2nd	Sri Lanka	Delhi	15 Sep 1982
143	Sandeep Patil & Dilip Vengsarkar	3rd	Pakistan	Sialkot	31 Oct 1984
188	Ravi Shastri & Krishnamachari Srikkanth	1st	England	Cuttack	27 Dec 1984
231	Sachin Tendulkar & Navjot Sidhu	2nd	Pakistan	Sharjah	15 Apr 1996
275*	Mohammad Azharuddin & Ajay Jadeja	4th	Zimbabwe	Cuttack	9 Apr 1998
318	Sourav Ganguly & Rahul Dravid	2nd	Sri Lanka	Taunton	26 May 1999
331	Sachin Tendulkar & Rahul Dravid	2nd	New Zealand	Hyderabad (Deccan)	8 Nov 1999

Two of those eight moves came inside nine weeks of each other in late 1984, and then the mark did not shift for eleven years and four months. The Shastri–Srikkanth 188 at Cuttack in December 1984 survived the 1983 champions growing old, the whole of the Azharuddin captaincy, three World Cups and Tendulkar's first six years in the side.

When it finally went, it went in a rush. Tendulkar and Sidhu put on 231 at Sharjah in April 1996. Azharuddin and Jadeja added an unbroken 275 at Cuttack in April 1998, which was then the world record for any wicket in a one-day international, beating the 263 Aamer Sohail and Inzamam-ul-Haq had made for Pakistan against New Zealand at Sharjah in 1993-94. Ganguly and Dravid passed that at Taunton thirteen months later, and Tendulkar and Dravid passed Taunton six months after that. Three record stands in nineteen months, and then nothing for twenty-seven years.

1996 to 1999, and why those four seasons dominate

Eight of the top twenty-five were made between April 1996 and November 1999. Five come from the whole of the 2000s, nine from the decade to 2019, and three since 2020.

The 1996-99 cluster has a specific cause. India played an enormous amount of one-day cricket in that window — Sharjah, Toronto, Dhaka, Colombo, tri-series after tri-series — much of it on flat surfaces against Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Kenya, and much of it with Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid and Azharuddin all in form at once. The fielding restrictions of the period also allowed a stand to accelerate late without a middle-overs squeeze, so a pair that survived twenty overs could bat for forty.

The modern entries are different in character. Ishan Kishan and Kohli's 290 at Chattogram in December 2022 came inside an innings of 409 for 8; Kishan reached 210 from 126 balls and Kohli made 113. Kohli and KL Rahul's unbroken 233 at the R Premadasa in September 2023 came in a rain-interrupted Asia Cup match India won by 228 runs, with Kohli 122 not out and Rahul 111 not out. Both were built at a rate the 1999 pairs never had to sustain. The wider arc of that change is set out in the guide to India's one-day international history.

Sri Lanka in nine of the twenty-five

Sri Lanka are the opponent in nine of the top twenty-five, spread across 1997, 1998, 1999, 2009, 2014 and three separate stands in 2017. Australia, Pakistan, West Indies, New Zealand, Bangladesh and Kenya appear twice each; Zimbabwe, England, Namibia and Afghanistan once each.

The R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo hosts four of them, more than any other ground, and Cuttack three. Neither is a coincidence. Colombo has staged more India fixtures than any venue outside the country, and the Barabati Stadium's long record of high-scoring one-day cricket is documented on the Cuttack venue records page. Thirteen of the twenty-five were made away from home.

The associate-nation entries sit awkwardly on a list of this kind, and it is worth saying plainly that three of the top ten — two against Kenya, one against Namibia — came against sides who were not then, and in two cases never became, Test-playing nations. Strip those out and the top ten reads as ten genuinely hard days' work.

The two hundred and fifty club

Six stands have reached 250: 331, 318, 290, 275, 258 and 252. Two of them were made in 1998, two in 1999, one in 2001 and one in 2022. Four of the six involve Ganguly or Dravid, and Tendulkar is in three.

The 1998-99 concentration is the striking part. In fourteen months India produced the world record for any wicket, then broke it, then broke it again. Nothing comparable has happened to an Indian batting record since, and the closest anyone has come in twenty-seven years is Kishan and Kohli's 290, still 41 runs short.

Four things the ranking does not show

The first is that a big stand and a comfortable win are not the same event. Taunton produced a 157-run margin and Hyderabad a 174-run one, but Azharuddin and Jadeja's world-record 275 at Cuttack ended in a 32-run win, and the 256 between Yuvraj Singh and Dhoni at Cuttack in January 2017 ended with India winning by 15. The relationship between a huge stand and a settled result is looser than it looks, as the ranking of India's highest ODI team totals also shows.

The second is that chases are structurally under-represented. A partnership in a successful chase stops when the target is passed, so pairs who have done the hardest batting for India appear here only if they happened to bat first. Nothing in India's biggest completed ODI run chases reaches the top ten of this list.

The third is the thinness of the middle order at the top of the table. Yuvraj Singh, VVS Laxman, Suresh Raina and Kedar Jadhav built a great deal of Indian one-day cricket at four, five and six, and between them they contribute three entries. Ranking by runs added will always favour the top three, which is also why so many of the names here appear among India's great opening batters rather than the middle-order players.

The fourth is the format effect. The largest stand in India's Test partnership records is bigger than 331 and took the better part of two days; the largest in India's T20I partnership records is under two-thirds the size and took about an hour. The fifty-over figure sits between them, and it has sat at 331 long enough to be the most durable batting record India hold. Wider background on the game in the country is in the guide to cricket in India.

Sources and method

Partnership runs, the wicket, the pair, opponent, venue and date all come from ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru partnership records for India in one-day internationals, queried innings by innings rather than by career aggregate so that each row is a single stand rather than a pair's lifetime total. Individual scores, match margins and the surrounding detail were checked against published scorecards and match reports for each match named. Figures were verified in August 2026 and cover every men's ODI to that date.

Two of the three tables are derived rather than quoted. The wicket-by-wicket table was assembled by filtering the same partnership data one wicket at a time. The record-progression table lists every stand that was India's largest at the moment it was made; it starts at 123 not out in June 1975 because no partnership in India's first three one-day internationals reached that figure, which was confirmed by querying the same data with a closing date rather than assumed. The statement that Dravid is the only batter involved in two 300-run one-day stands is reported as a record by the source rather than computed here.