The top 500 companies in India have 664 women directors on their boards with Apollo Hospital Enterprises having the highest women representation of six, followed by Godrej Consumer Products, Piramal Enterprises and India Cements having five each.
These companies have employed 11.6 lakh women and have created 3.9 lakh new jobs in the last one year ended October, according to the 2022 Burgundy Private Hurun India 500 list released on Thursday. Women make up 16 per cent of the boards of top-500 companies. However, only 410 companies in this year Burgundy Private Hurun India 500 list have women’s representation on their boards.
Interestingly, gender equality is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the Securities and Exchange Board of India, which mandates appointment of at least one independent woman director in top 1,000-listed companies by market capitalisation.
Tata Consultancy Services is the largest employer with 592,195 employees, of which, 27,055 are women. Similarly, Infosys and Wipro, which employ 124,498 and 88,946 people, have women an employee strength of 24,177 and 16,952. Quess Corp was the second largest employee at 436,907.
Motherson Sumi Systems and Reliance Industries employs 26,050 and 22,620 women employees. In all, the top 500 companies employ 7.3 million people with an average of 14,500, and 137 of them have over 10,000 employees.
Value unchanged
The value of top 500 companies in India remained unchanged this year even while Reliance Industries, Tata Consultancy Services and HDFC Bank topped the list.
With a value of ₹17.3-lakh crore, the top-ranked Reliance Industries was 47 per cent more valuable than TCS, which had a market capitalisation of ₹11.7-lakh crore. HDFC Bank was valued at ₹8.3-lakh crore.
Blame it on windfall tax, Reliance Industries emerged as the highest tax payer at ₹16,297 crore and most profitable company with net profit of ₹67,845 crore in the year-ended October.
The top 10 industrial groups own 61 or 12 per cent of the top 500 companies, led by Tata Group with 15 companies followed by the Adani and Murugappa groups with 8 and 6 companies.
Anas Rahman Junaid, Managing Director and Chief Researcher, Hurun India said with a total value of $2.7 trillion the top 500 companies are equivalent to India’s current GDP.
Together, these companies had combined sales of $820 billion and employed 7.3 million staff, which is more than the working population of the United Arab Emirates, he said.