Rs 70,000 a week. That's the figure now floating around for the six contestants who fought their way into the Bigg Boss Telugu 10 house through the show's Agnipariksha selection round, according to 123telugu, which cited reports doing the rounds in trade circles.

Nobody official has confirmed this. No production house, no channel, no contestant has put a number on record. But the figure has stuck, and it's already the thing fans are chewing over barely a week into the season.

Here's the split, as far as anyone can tell. This season has ten celebrity contestants and six who came in via Agnipariksha, the audition gauntlet that's become the show's way of manufacturing a few breakout non-celebrity names each year. The Agnipariksha lot, per the reports, are on that flat Rs 70,000 weekly rate for the run of their stay.

The celebrities aren't on any single number. 123telugu's reporting says their pay is negotiated individually, built around popularity, market value and how much Bigg Boss mileage they've already banked from earlier seasons or other shows. Which tracks. A contestant walking in with a fan base and a decade of screen time isn't going to sign for the same cheque as someone who's never faced a camera outside an audition round.

It's worth sitting with what Agnipariksha actually buys these six. They don't have the built-in following the celebrity contestants carry in with them. What they get instead is twelve, sometimes fourteen weeks of prime-time visibility, a shot at the kind of overnight recognition that takes other actors years to build. The money is secondary to that trade, or at least that's the theory the format runs on.

Whether Rs 70,000 a week is generous or stingy depends entirely on who you ask, and Telugu television Twitter has already started asking. Some read it as fair for contestants who haven't proven a market yet. Others think it's low set against what a season of Bigg Boss can do for a nobody's career, real money left on the table.

None of this is confirmed by Star Maa, by the show's producers, or by any contestant named on record. Bigg Boss pay figures have a habit of doing the rounds every season without ever getting officially nailed down, and this one looks headed the same way unless someone inside the production decides to put a number to it.

For now the house is running, the Agnipariksha six are settling into a season that'll test them a lot harder than the audition did, and the only real confirmation anyone's likely to get is whichever contestant walks out first and decides to talk.