If Everyone Gets Pizza, Why’s the CEO Eating the Whole Box?

Imagine this. Your school has a captain. He gets the fanciest lunchbox, a gold star every day, and a big shiny trophy, even when the team loses and half the class is told they can’t come to practice anymore. Sounds unfair, right? Well, that’s exactly what's happening in real life.

- Ravi Shankar

Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran just bagged a ₹155.81 crore paycheck for FY25. That’s up 15 per cent from last year—a pay bump that amounts to ₹42.6 lakh per day, including weekends, holidays, and days employees packed their desks while Tata Consultancy Services is laying off 12,000 employees, and Air India (also Tata-owned) clocked ₹10,859 crore in losses. The cognitive dissonance couldn’t be clearer: a celebrated chairman getting a 15 per cent raise when massive layoffs and soaring losses in flagship companies are happening. Take K Krithivasan, the TCS CEO, who in fiscal year 2025 earned ₹26.52 crore million—a 4.6 per cent raise from the previous year. But this isn’t just about one man or one conglomerate. This is about the moral Rubik’s cube at the heart of modern capitalism. Tata Sons’ profit after tax jumped nearly 10x in five years from ₹2,680 crore in FY2020 to ₹26,232 crore in FY2025. So yeah, Chandrasekaran did lead a monster jump in profits. And that’s the corporate defence: “Big numbers equals big reward.” Those profits didn’t trickle down. Sure, the numbers sound righteous, if you ignore those earning around ₹22.5 lakh a year at Tata. The ladder was built by them, but they can’t climb it. Only the big chief gets the cigar.