BCCI Announces Central Contracts For India Women's Cricketers For 2020-21 Season

A few weeks after BCCI listed out the central contracts for the Indian men’s team for the 2020-21 season, they have also announced for the female players. The Indian cricket board has categorized those into three categories, namely A, B, and C. Grade A contains three players, followed by ten in B, while the C category has six of them.

Grade A, whose payment scale is INR 50 lakhs, has Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, and Poonam Yadav. Harmanpreet Kaur is the Indian women’s T20 captain and ushered the women in blue to the final of the 2020 T20 Women’s World Cup in Australia. Smriti Mandhana is one of the significant batters of the women’s team, while Poonam Yadav, the leggie, has also impressed on several occasions.

Shafali Verma, who has seen a meteoric rise in recent times, has earned a promotion to category B. The 17-year old opening batter set the tone at the top by delivering brisk starts for India in the T20 World Cup last year and is set to ply her trade in The Hundred and Big Bash League moving forward. She is amongst the ten cricketers, who will make INR 30 lakhs.

As for Veda Krishnamurthy, she has been dropped from the list after not earning selection for the upcoming tour of England and suffering a family tragedy. The 28-year old, who lost out on a central contract along with Ekta Bisht, Anuja Patil and D Hemalatha, sustained the deaths of her mother and sister due to COVID-19. Mansi Joshi and Priya Punia are amongst the ones in Category C, set to receive INR 10 lakhs.

BCCI’s annual contracts for Indian women’s team for 2020-21:

Category A (INR 50 lakhs): Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, and Poonam Yadav

Category B (INR 30 lakhs): Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Deepti Sharma, Punam Raut, Rajeshwari Gayakwad, Shafali Verma, Radha Yadav, Shikha Pandey, Tanya Bhatia, Jemimah Rodrigues.

Category C (INR 10 lakhs): Mansi Joshi, Arundhati Reddy, Pooja Vastrakar, Harleen Deol, Priya Puniya, Richa Ghosh.

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