Mukesh Ambani, billionaire industrialist and India’s richest person, has not taken a pay hike for seven years, yet his salary is over 205 times that of the median employee remuneration at his Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL). However, this ratio stands much higher at 439 times in the case of ITC Executive Chairman YC Deveshar’s pay.
The median wage is the remuneration “in the middle”. That is, half of the workers earn below this level.
The ratio is a much lower 89 times in the case of Wipro’s Chairman and Managing Director Azim Premji, and just 19 times for mortgage giant HDFC’s Chairman Deepak Parekh for fiscal 2014-15. However, HDFC Bank’s Managing Director Aditya Puri got a remuneration that was 117 times the median employee pay at the bank, while for ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar it was 97 times and at over 74 times for Axis Bank’s Managing Director and CEO Shikha Sharma.
For IT giant Infosys’ CEO Vishal Sikka, his pay was 116 times of the median employee pay at the company. Listed companies have begun disclosing these ratios, as also other comparisons such as salary hikes for the top management and the average staff, for the first time, pursuant to the new Companies Act and SEBI’s latest corporate governance code coming into force.
While the majority of the companies are still in the process of disclosing these details, the disclosures made so far by the top companies show a wide variance in these ratios; there is also a huge difference between the pay hike figures for the top management personnel and the average staff member in many cases. However, there are a few cases where the increase in the median employee remuneration is almost equal or even higher than that of the CEOs and other key management personnel.
In the case of RIL, Chairman and MD Mukesh Ambani has kept his salary capped at ₹15 crore for seven years now, while the median remuneration of employees increased by 3.71 per cent to ₹7.29 lakh during 2014-15. The total remuneration of key managerial personnel dipped 1.93 per cent to ₹73.28 crore.