I'm not sure but I guess he knows what's his priorities.
His channel is doing good, he's future commentator and it seems he's going to be very likable and famous if he join the commentary box. His cricketing knowledge is amazing and we need such commentators especially from India because majority of our commentators are mediocre except Harsha (Dinesh Kartik started very well tho).
How much these guys earn from the job as commentators? I guess the pay level will be much lower than what they would earn from the IPL. And for Ashwin, he still goes for well over $1 million a year in the IPL auctions. So I don't think that he has any immediate plan to take retirement from the game and concentrate on the commentator job. I agree with you on the mediocre quality of Indian commentators. Sanjay Manjrekar is a perfect example. It surprises me that this guy is not yet fired by his employer.
Their yearly salary can touch 1 million easily. Usually almost all commentators gets $50-60K per series (International) and when they gets gigs in the IPL then top commentators can bag maximum $700,000.
Basically they have 3 categories in IPL.
-English Panel $250,000 to $500,000 (Harsha, Gavaskar, Simon etc)
-Hindi Panel $80,000 to $350,000 (Deep Das gupta, Pathan, Akash chopra etc)
-Dugout Panel $500,000 to $700,000 (Brian Lara, Scott Styris, Graeme Swann etc) Here they focus more on technical stuff, hence bigger pay check)