Section 217(2A) of the "
Companies Act, 1956" states:
[(2A)(a) The Board's report shall also include a statement showing the name of every employee of the company who-
(i) if employed throughout the financial year, was in receipt of remuneration for that year which, in the aggregate, was not less than 6[such sum as may be prescribed]; or]
(ii) if employed for a part of the financial year, was in receipt of remuneration for any part of that year, at a rate which, in the aggregate, was not less than 7[such sum per month as may be prescribed8; or]
9[(iii) if employed throughout the financial year or part thereof, was in receipt of remuneration in that year which, in the aggregate, or as the case may be, at a rate which, in the aggregate, is in excess of that drawn by the managing director or whole-time director or manager and holds by himself or along with his spouse and dependent children, not less than two per cent, of the equity shares of the company.]
(b) The statement referred to in clause (a) shall also indicate,-
(i) whether any such employee is a relative of any director or manager of the company and if so, the name of such director, and
(ii) such other particulars, as may be prescribed.
Explanation.- "Remuneration" has the meaning assigned to it in the Explanation to section 198.]
With effect from Financial Year 2004, Rs. 2,00,000 per month has been prescribed as the sum mentioned above. For FY07-08,
Infosys had 486 employees that were employed for the full year and earned more than Rs. 2 lakhs per month. You can get all the gory details simply by downloading and looking at tehir latest
Annual Report. Here's my study of this data.
Before I begin, some disclaimers.
- The data is by no means representative of average salaries in the industry. Infosys is not even the largest IT services company in India.
- The data is not representative either. It would be incorrect, for example, to conclude that engineers with 10 years of experience drew an average salary of Rs. 28 lakhs in 2007-08 based on this data. This is because we are provided with data only of those engineers that earned more than Rs. 24 lakhs between Mar 2007 and Mar 2008. For all we know, there are legions more of 10 year Infoscions earning a pittance hidden away in the depths within the deep dark underbelly of the Infyplex.
- The data does includes only those Infosys employees that are working in India.
- Both the aforementioned Section 198 of the Companies Act and the footnotes to the "Particulars of Employees" table in the annual report are silent on the matter of bonuses and stock options. The footnote in annual report I find particularly egregious.
Remuneration includes basic salary, allowances, taxable value of perquisites, etc.
Etc.? Excuse me? - After cut-pasting the table out to excel (by no means an easy, error free task in itself), I carelessly sliced and diced it at will. I wasn't being thorough or careful. Remember, I was not, nor do I expect to, get paid for this. I might have made mistakes. I probably made quite a few.
I draw no conclusions, make no judgements. Please leave a comment if you do. Now on to the study.
First the big picture. These 486 employees that make the mark draw an average of Rs. 33 lakhs per annum in salary. Only 79 of these 486 are what one may call "Career Infoscions" -- i.e., people whose first job was at Infosys. 71% of them are Engineers, by which I mean they give B.E or B.Tech as thier first degree. Quite a few more clearly are engineers in that they're doing engineering roles; Several have a basic science degree, for example, followed by an MCA. There might have also been an occasional diploma holder or two, who later went on to do his BE that I missed.
The median Infosys engineer making this list is 37 years old having spent 15 years in the industry of which the last 10 were at Infosys. The median salary for this engineer is Rs. 29 lakhs. Pretty modest, eh?
Next, look at the designations. There are 2 directors, 2 CXOs, 1 Co-chairman, 6 SVPs, 25 VPs and 69 AVPs -- A total of 105 senior level executives (22% of all 217ers). Interestingly, while the average VP earns Rs. 12.7 lakhs more than the average AVP, the highest paid AVP actually earns more than the highest paid VP. Only 1 in 5 (20%) of VPs and AVPs are "career Infoscions", the rest are lateral recruits.
One question that I was interested in was in the presence of women in the list. The Infosys
annual report states that women constitute 31% of their total workforce. The 217(2A) table does not mention the sex of each employee, so I was forced to rely on guesswork and Google. By my reckoning, a mere 28 (5.7%) of the employees in the table are women.
Here's a table that lists all of the statistics that I collected by group:
[If the table above is not fully visible, it's not my fault. That would be a Google Docs mess up. Please see here instead]
On the whole, the picture that emerges from the data is less than satisfactory from an analyst's view point. There aren't any clear patterns and trends that jump out pf the page and grab you. Take a look at the histogram and CDF, for example:
My primary purpose as I set out to do this study was to see if there is any sort approximate relationship between number of years of experience and salaries. There is none. See for yourself:
I then tried to see if perhaps there'll be a correspondence of sorts if one looked at the employee's age or the number of years he/she had spent at Infosys. Once again, I drew a blank. The latter is scatter plot is particularly unhelpful. The points came out so scattered, I didn't even add a trend line.
On the verge of giving it all up, I decide I'd give one last try. This time, I'd look only at the
salaries of engineers. I would also track the median salary besides the minimum, maximum and average. (There is something good about
medians, as against averages, that escapes me at the moment, but however it be) Here it is:
Now, this is only slightly more satisfactory than the previous two. Besides the guys with more than 24 years of experience were distorting the whole picture. So I narrowed my field of vision to only those with less than 20 years of experience. Here you have it:
I'm sad to report that many hours of effort have been wasted on this quite utterly useless piece of research. I had nursed ambitions of finding relationships and gaining insights that would help me when I next discussed the matter of salaries with my collegues. I would test these new found relationships against 217ers of different companies and gain even more powerful insights. I would plot the year-on-year trends between and across companies. Well. Friggin' waste of time! I vote they remove Section 217(2A) from the bloody act. Thank you for stopping by.
