How much do big wigs earn?

We mere mortals who toil day and night at work, get modest pay hikes and are very happy, most of the times, with the marginal rise in salary. But ever wondered how much pay hike these big honchos of India Inc get?

Well, it seems some of their salaries are already so high that they do not “take” a pay hike. Apparently, Mukesh Ambani has not got a pay hike in seven years but then why would he need it when his salary is already 205 times the median employee salary at Reliance Industries. The richest man of India earns a salary of Rs.15 crore per annum and this has been his salary for the past seven years. On the other hand, the median remuneration of employees increased by 3.71% to Rs 7.29 lakh during FY15 while  fell 2%.

Another big wig, ITC’s Deveshwar too has a huge fat pay check and his ratio of salary to that of employees stands at a whopping 439 times. But he has got a pay hike – his salary, which is over Rs.15 crore (gross) for FY15 while net salary was at Rs.7 crore, showed a 24% jump in salary while that of employees rose 14%.

Wipro’s Azim Premji earned a salary of Rs.5 crore in FY15 and this was in fact a pay cut of over 50% while the employee median rose by 9.5%. Though Premji took a salary cut, his CEO got a 39% pay hike.

This is for the first time ever that we are getting such information and this is following SEBI’s diktat under the Coprorate Governance Code, wherein it has asked companies to make these disclosures. This code came into effect from Oct’14 and that’s why the Annual Reports of FY15 currently carries this information.

Indeed a very good code to assess how imbalanced is the CEO salaries with the performance and goals of the company. Some companies do pay a lot more than deserved to many of its employees with no relevance to performance. Hopefully, this code will correct that.