India's Highest Paid CEOs

CEOs are getting paid more than before. But is there a co-relation between pay and performance?

- Sonal Khetarpal

With an astronomically high compensation of 146 crore, C.P. Gurnani, CEO and Managing Director, Tech Mahindra, was India Inc’s highest-paid professional CEO in 2017/18. Gurnani was followed by A.M. Naik, Group Chairman of Larsen and Toubro (L&T), who took home a pay packet of 137 crore. At a distant number three was HDFC Bank’s Managing Director, Aditya Puri, who earned 41.10 crore in the same year.

While Gurnani earned a massive 3,151 times more than the median pay of his company’s workforce, Naik’s salary was 1,725 times higher than the average salary in L&T. He surely would have never imagined that he would be among the highest paid Indian CEOs when he joined L&T as a junior engineer way back in 1965, and took home a salary of 670 per month. They are outliers, and these sums are including their long-term stock options, but more on that later.

The salaries of Gurnani and Naik may seem disproportionately high, but corporate India is pampering its CEOs. The CEO/MD pay of the 500 NSE listed companies, as per a Prime Database study, increased 13.40 per cent (in 2017/18) over the previous year from 2,909 crore to 3,299 crore. These CEOs are not just earning a fortune, their pay is also substantially more than that of other employees in the organisation. In FY18, Indian CEOs and MDs earned an average of 165 times more than the median employee pay (500 NSE listed companies), up from 160 times in the previous year. Aditya Puri, MD, HDFC Bank, for instance, earned 209 times more than the other employees. Similarly, Aditya Ghosh, currently CEO, India and South Asia, OYO Rooms, during his stint as President of Inter Globe Aviation last year (which owns IndiGo Airlines) earned