Harmanpreet, Smriti, Poonam bag top annual contract from BCCI, Mithali dropped to grade B

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on Thursday announced Annual Player Contracts for women team for the period from October 2019 to September 2020.

Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, and Poonam Yadav were awarded grade A contract while in grade B, a total of eight players have been named Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Jemimah Rodrigues, Ekta Bisht, Radha Yadav, Shikha Pandey, Deepti Sharma, Taniya Bhatia.

Grade C players include Veda Krishnamurthy, Punam Raut, Anuja Patil, Mansi Joshi, D Hemlatha, Arundhati Reddy, Rajeshwari Gayakwad, Pooja Vastrakar, Harleen Deol, Priya Punia, and Shafali Verma.

Category A players will get Rs 50 lakhs while B and C category players will get Rs 30 lakhs and Rs 10 lakhs respectively.

Earlier in the day, wicket-keeper batsman MS Dhoni was dropped from the BCCI's list of central contract players, while Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, and Jasprit Bumrah have been listed in the A+ category.

The 38-year-old Dhoni is currently enjoying some time away from the game. He last played competitive cricket during the World Cup.

Annually, A+ category players will receive Rs 7 crore, while A category players get Rs 5 crore. B and C category players will get Rs 3 crore and Rs 1 crore respectively.

Here is the list of players under each category:

A+ category: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, and Jasprit Bumrah.

A category: Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Chesteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, KL Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Mohammed Shami, Ishant Sharma, Kuldeep Yadav, Rishabh Pant.

B category: Wriddhiman Saha, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Hardik Pandya, Mayank Agarwal.

C category: Kedar Jadhav, Navdeep Saini, Deepak Chahar, Manish Pandey, Hanuma Vihari, Shardul Thakur, Shreyas Iyer, and Washington Sundar.