India off-spinner Sree Charani has set the highest rating ever recorded in the ICC Women's T20I Bowling Rankings, reaching 817 points — 11 clear of the previous benchmark of 806 set by Australia's Megan Schutt back in November 2018. The milestone was confirmed by the ICC on September 29, capping a stretch of tournament cricket that took the 22-year-old from a title-winning Asia Cup to a gold medal at the Asian Games inside the space of three weeks.
Charani's rise up the rankings was built on back-to-back tournament wins for India. At the Asian Games in Japan, she returned career-best figures of 4 for 10 against hosts Japan in the quarter-final — a spell built around two separate double-wicket bursts that bowled Japan out for just 57 — before adding two more wickets in India's 147-run win over Sri Lanka in the September 22 gold-medal final, the performance that carried her rating to its new peak. Those figures came on top of a strong Women's Asia Cup campaign in Dubai in the weeks before, where India lifted an eighth title.
Rating points in the ICC's system reward consistency across a run of matches rather than any single spell, so a mark 11 points clear of a record that stood for nearly eight years reflects a sustained run of containing and wicket-taking bowling rather than one outlying performance. Schutt's 806 had been the standard for the format for the better part of a decade; Charani becoming the first bowler to pass it puts her spell of form at the Asia Cup and Asian Games among the best short-format bowling stretches recorded for any nation.
Charani's rise also reflects well on India's white-ball bowling pipeline more broadly — she shared the workload through the Asian Games with Shafali Verma, who chipped in with wickets of her own against Japan before switching to bat and finishing that match off with the bat, a sign of the all-round depth India's white-ball sides can call on beyond their headline seam and spin options.
A record of this kind doesn't guarantee future form, but it does mark Charani as the bowler opposition batting units will now plan around first in white-ball cricket, particularly in the shorter format where India's spin-heavy attack has increasingly set the tone in the Asia Cup and Asian Games cycles. For India's selectors, having a world No. 1-rated bowler still only 22 years old is a rare planning luxury heading into the next T20I assignments on the calendar.
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Sree Charani's rating points, the previous record and her Asia Cup and Asian Games figures are verified against same-day and freshly re-checked reporting, current as of September 30, 2026.
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