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.