Ajit Agarkar’s tenure as India’s chief selector appears to be approaching its end. The former India all-rounder has communicated to the BCCI that he intends to step down when his current term expires on October 4, although the Board has stopped short of formally announcing his departure. It would close a three-year period in which India reached the 2023 ODI World Cup final, won the 2024 and 2026 T20 World Cups and lifted the 2025 Champions Trophy.
Judging a selector only by trophies, however, misses the more interesting story. Selection changes careers: some players acquire permanence, leadership and repeated chances, while others move from the heart of the national side to its margins. To measure that movement, we constructed an India Career Value Index, or ICVI, scored out of 100: 40 points for India involvement, 30 for international performance, 20 for trust at ICC tournaments and 10 for institutional standing through central contracts and leadership.
The ICVI is not a verdict on talent or whether a decision was “right”; it measures how embedded a player was within India’s structure at a particular point. For players who lost ground, the comparison is between their highest ICVI during Agarkar’s tenure and where they stand now. For beneficiaries, it is the change from July 2023, when Agarkar took charge, to the present.
The steepest falls: Shami, Chahal and Gaikwad
Mohammed Shami produces the most extraordinary negative swing. His ICVI peaked at 98 after he remained central to India’s ODI plans, held a Grade A contract and delivered two outstanding ICC tournaments. At the 2023 World Cup, Shami took 24 wickets in seven matches at 10.70, finishing as the tournament’s highest wicket-taker despite sitting out India’s first four games. At the 2025 Champions Trophy, he returned with nine wickets in five matches and was again named in the ICC’s Team of the Tournament.
{{/usCountry}}Mohammed Shami produces the most extraordinary negative swing. His ICVI peaked at 98 after he remained central to India’s ODI plans, held a Grade A contract and delivered two outstanding ICC tournaments. At the 2023 World Cup, Shami took 24 wickets in seven matches at 10.70, finishing as the tournament’s highest wicket-taker despite sitting out India’s first four games. At the 2025 Champions Trophy, he returned with nine wickets in five matches and was again named in the ICC’s Team of the Tournament.
{{/usCountry}}Yet Shami has not played for India since the Champions Trophy final in March 2025. His exclusion persisted even after a 2025-26 domestic season in which he collected 69 wickets in 22 matches across the Ranji Trophy, Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy and Vijay Hazare Trophy, including 37 Ranji wickets at 16.72. He also went from Grade A in 2024-25 to no central contract in 2025-26, taking his ICVI from 98 at its peak to zero now.
Yuzvendra Chahal’s decline is less spectacular numerically but cleaner as a selection story. He was still an active India T20I bowler when Agarkar took charge and played all five matches in the West Indies in August 2023, taking five wickets. When that series ended, Chahal had 96 wickets in 80 T20Is and 121 in 72 ODIs; the final match of that tour, on August 13, 2023, remains his most recent international appearance.
Chahal then missed the 2023 ODI World Cup, returned to the squad for the 2024 T20 World Cup but did not play, and disappeared again. Agarkar had explained his 2023 Asia Cup omission by pointing to Axar Patel’s batting value and saying Kuldeep Yadav was slightly ahead in the wrist-spin race. Chahal’s ICVI falls from 43 early in the tenure to zero now, with no route back into the international side despite remaining a high-level specialist.
Ruturaj Gaikwad is different because the numbers argue not that his performance collapsed, but that his opportunity did. Across his T20Is in 2023 and 2024, Gaikwad scored 498 runs at an average of 62.25 and a strike rate of 150. Against Australia in late 2023, he topped the series with 223 runs at 55.75 and a strike rate of 159.28, while his last stretch against Zimbabwe strengthened rather than weakened his case.
His last T20I nevertheless came on July 13, 2024. Gaikwad remains centrally contracted in Grade C and has returned to the ODI squad, so his career has not vanished in the Chahal sense, but his T20I standing has. His ICVI drops from a peak of 65 — when he was producing elite numbers and had captained India at the Asian Games — to 23 now.
The biggest gains: Abhishek, Varun and Tilak
If Shami defines the steepest fall, Abhishek Sharma defines the opposite extreme. He had never played international cricket when Agarkar took over, giving him a starting ICVI of zero. Since debuting in July 2024, Abhishek has reached 1,858 T20I runs in 59 matches at a strike rate of 194.55, with three hundreds and 12 fifties, while his peak ICC rating of 931 remains the highest ever achieved by a men’s T20I batter.
That combination of sustained selection and extraordinary scoring speed pushes Abhishek’s present ICVI to 93. The significance is not simply that the selectors found an opener, but that they repeatedly backed a high-variance method. His 30-ball hundred against Afghanistan this week only underlined how completely India’s T20 identity has moved towards his kind of batting.
Varun Chakaravarthy’s rise is equally dramatic because his international career had appeared finished. Before his recall in October 2024, he had played six T20Is, taken only two wickets and then spent 1,066 days outside the India side. Agarkar’s committee reopened the door; Varun subsequently took nine wickets in three matches at the 2025 Champions Trophy at 15.1 and an economy of 4.53, before finishing joint-highest wicket-taker at the 2026 T20 World Cup with 14.
Varun also moved from no central contract at the start of the tenure to Grade C and became a first-choice white-ball spinner whenever available. His ICVI moves from zero in July 2023 to 93, level with Abhishek. In selection terms, there has been no more successful reclamation project during Agarkar’s period.
Tilak Varma completes the top three. He was uncapped when Agarkar took charge and received his maiden T20I call-up in the first squad announced after the new chairman’s appointment. Three years later, Tilak has 1,645 T20I runs at 44.45 and a strike rate of 145.18, including successive hundreds in South Africa, 207 runs at the 2026 T20 World Cup and an unbeaten 69 in the 2025 Asia Cup final.
Tilak has also moved beyond merely being selected. He is now India’s T20I vice-captain and holds a Grade C contract, lifting his ICVI from zero to 84. Agarkar’s committee did not inherit him as an established international; it helped turn him into part of the format’s leadership core.
Two careers sit just outside these extremes. Sanju Samson, after years of intermittent selection, scored three T20I hundreds in 2024 and then produced 321 runs in five innings at 80.25 and a strike rate of 199.37 to become Player of the Tournament at the 2026 T20 World Cup. Ishan Kishan offers a different complexity: he plunged out of India’s plans and lost his contract, then returned spectacularly enough to become one of the central figures of the 2026 side.
That may be the clearest way to remember Agarkar’s tenure. It was not merely a period in which India won trophies; it was one in which selection capital moved quickly and sometimes brutally. Shami, Chahal and Gaikwad show how rapidly established value could evaporate, while Abhishek, Varun and Tilak show how aggressively the same committee was prepared to invest in a different kind of player.