Ex-HR head of Infosys, Mohandas Pai backs Murthy as the company defends salary hike

Infosys has vehemently defended the hike in the compensation of its COO U B Pravin Rao, saying the revision was arrived at after benchmarking against peers. On the objections raised by co-founder and former chairman N R Narayana Murthy, Infosys said the country’s second-largest software exporter said it views the statement by Murthy as “important feedback” and will continue to work with all stakeholders to ensure long-term interest of the company. Justifying the over 33% hike in Rao’s compensation, Infosys said the cash component has decreased from Rs 5.2 crore to Rs 4.6 crore and it is only the performance-based component that has been raised from 45% to 63%. The company said considering the four-year vesting period of the stocks given to Rao, the hike came to just 1.4% for 2017-18. Backing Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthy’s view on pay hike to COO U B Pravin Rao being “not proper,” company’s ex-director T V Mohandas Pai today said the salary in this case is “spectacular” but performance is not. Alleging that Infosys’ board was “misguided”, Pai said the ““fundamental problem” was the pay hike given earlier to CEO Vishal Sikka “without any justification”, because of which other executives were also expecting higher pay. He said salary levels in India cannot be compared with that in the US. “I totally agree with Murthy that it was not proper. We should have Indian norm for compensation; we can’t follow American norm, we (Infosys) are not an American company,” Pai, who was also formerly Chief Finance Officer of Infosys, told in a telephonic interview. With inputs from PTI