Infosys pays highest salaries to its executives

Million-dollar pay cheques no longer raise eyebrows in the Indian IT industry. Given the huge demand for high quality professionals, some top-notch companies are willing to pay the big bucks.

Six employees of Infosys Technologies posted overseas earn $1 million annually, perhaps making the company the highest paymaster in the Indian IT industry.

According to sources, these six employees are neither part of the founding team and nor are they board members. In fact, they are business heads of the company’s different verticals.

The list does not end here. There are around five professionals who earn a package of $800,000 and about 25 professionals in the $500,000 bracket.

In the case of Infosys, the differentiating factor is that they (employees) are professionals and are no way linked to the founder members. For example, Infosys CEO S Gopalakrishnan gets an annual compensation of Rs 51.74 lakh while COO S D Shibulal earns Rs 46.37 lakh.

This kind of compensation structure actually rules out potential conflict of interest between founder employees and others, according to a senior company official. On the other hand, in Wipro, the highest-paid employee is chairman Azim Premji, who takes home Rs 3.58 crore.

The compensation at Infosys includes performance bonus and represents the total cost to company. Infosys recently introduced a performance-linked wage structure for its senior employees.

According to sources in Infosys, this compensation is generally applicable to people posted overseas, but even when they are working out of India, their salary touches around Rs 1 crore. HR director T V Mohandas Pai is the highest earner among Infosys employees with an annual package of Rs 91 lakh.

Sources said that these million-dollar packages are not for public consumption as these employees work overseas and are governed by privacy laws that does not make it mandatory to make this information public.