‘This is not the culture…’: Former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai slams IT companies in pay scale disparity

Former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai has criticized IT companies for the perceived disparity in pay scales between senior management and new entrants.

Sharing the article on X (officially Twitter), Pai called the development a “sad situation”.

“It’s a very sad state of affairs in the IT sector in India. Boards need to stop being selfish, rewarding the CEOs with too much, give more and more and a much better deal to the freshers and the bottom 50%.” This is not the culture in which the provision of IT services grew earlier,” he wrote.

The salaries of CEOs at five of India’s top IT companies have grown by more than 160% in the past five years, while newcomers have grown by less than 4% over the same period, according to Moneycontrol data.

Annual reports from Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCLTech, Wipro and Tech Mahindra highlight stagnant wage growth and its impact on economic consumption.

India’s top five IT services firms saw their number of employees decline for the seventh consecutive quarter, but the slow pace of this reduction in the April-June quarter has fueled optimism that these companies could end the fiscal year with net growth in their workforces, reports said.

Together, these five companies ended the first quarter of fiscal 2025 with a total of 1.523 million, up from 1.525 million at the end of March.

As the discretionary spending environment turned unfavorable due to high interest rates and cautious customer sentiment in their core markets of the US and Europe, the growth rate fell from double digits to low single digits.