The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which is also the world’s richest cricket board, has not paid its 27 elite contracted players since October.
According to the Indian Express report, the quarterly payment is due since October last year.
The board is yet to pay match fees for the two Tests, nine ODIs and eight T20 games that the national team has played since December 2019.
The total amount which is paid by the BCCI every year when all grades clubbed together is Rs 99 crore.
Grade A+ cricketers include Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, and Jasprit Bumrah who receive Rs 7 crore annually. Grade A players get 5 crores; grade B gets Rs 3 crore, and grade C is allotted Rs 1 crore.
The match fees for each Test, ODI and T20 are Rs 15 lakh, Rs 6 lakh, and Rs 3 lakh, respectively.
The balance sheet of the cricket board revealed that it has a bank balance of Rs 5,526 crore, as of March 2018, including Rs 2,992 crore in fixed deposits.
BCCI had also signed a five-year broadcasting deal with Star TV worth Rs 6,138.1 crore in April 2018.
This may be due to the fact that the position of the Chief Financial officer has been vacant since December. Other key positions including Chief Executive Officer and General Manager (Cricket Operations) have been vacant since last month.
This comes as BCCI president Sourav Ganguly and secretary Jay Shah have completed their tenure. The board has now approached the Supreme Court to quash the “cooling off” clause in the board’s constitution so as to keep Ganguly and Shah in their respective positions.
The Indian Express report further stated that the payment of domestic players from different states including Jharkhand, Mumbai, Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir, Pondicherry, Baroda, Railways, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh has not been done either.
Meanwhile, The governing council of the Indian Premier League is likely to meet on August 2 to finalize the schedule for the upcoming IPL and discuss other arrangements for the IPL event that is to be held in the UAE this year, as per media reports.