From top earners to players with big pay cuts: BCCI's new central contracts list for 2021-22

In BCCI's recently-released new central contracts list, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah remain the top earners whereas some big names have been demoted along with some youngsters moving up the ladder:

Rohit, Kohli, Bumrah remain the top earners after the new central contracts list was released by the Indian cricket board:

New BCCI annual contract list:

Grade A+ (INR 70 million or INR 7 crore): Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah.

Grade A (INR 50 million or INR 5 crore): Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, KL Rahul, Mohammed Shami and Rishabh Pant.

Grade B (INR 30 million or INR 3 crore): Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, Axar Patel, Shardul Thakur, Shreyas Iyer, Mohammed Siraj and Ishant Sharma.

Grade C (INR 10 million or INR 1 crore): Shikhar Dhawan, Umesh Yadav, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Hardik Pandya, Washington Sundar, Shubman Gill, Hanuma Vihari, Yuzvendra Chahal, Suryakumar Yadav, Wriddhiman Saha, Mayank Agarwal and Deepak Chahar.

All-rounder Hardik Pandya and Shikhar Dhawan have fallen from Grade A to Grade C in the BCCI central contracts system. Meanwhile, Test specialists Cheteshwar Pujara and former vice-captain Ajinkya Rahane have also slipped from Grade A to Grade B. Ishant Sharma also finds himself in the same category.

Wriddhiman Saha, also dropped from the Test line-up recently, has moved down to Grade C. 

In the new central contracts list, the likes of Shreyas Iyer, Axar Patel and Mohammed Siraj were rightly rewarded for growing in stature across formats and have now moved up to the Grade B category (INR 30 million or INR 3 crore).

Suryakumar Yadav has been sensational since his international debut. While so far he has only featured in the white-ball formats, the swashbuckling cricketer has made a mark. He scored a fifty on T20I debut and was the Player-of-the-Series in his maiden ODI series (in Sri Lanka). His ODI strike rate is 103.08 whereas he strikes at a whopping 165.56 in the shortest format with 4 half-centuries already under his belt.

SKY features in Group C (INR 10 million or INR 1 crore) along with seniors such as Shikhar, Bhuvneshwar Kumar-Umesh Yadav (also demoted), Saha along with Deepak Chahar, Hardik, Mayank Agarwal, etc.

In the new central contracts, Kuldeep Yadav and Navdeep Saini have been excluded as the duo's downfall remain evident. While the two have been part of the Indian team setup, both haven't got enough opportunities.

Kuldeep features in the playing XIs but only from time to time whereas Navdeep last represented India during the second-stringed side's tour of Sri Lanka in mid-2021.