Now, new regulations in India have mandated making that information public.
The Companies Act of 2013 (pdf) and the new Corporate Governance Code by the Securities and Exchange Board of India require that listed firms disclose the ratio of remuneration of directors to the median employee salary.
Quartz collated the numbers by scanning the 2014-2015 annual reports of 10 leading blue chip Indian companies. And the difference between what a CEO earns and what the rest of the employees take home is staggering.
The man leading the pack, according to our analysis, is Y C Deveshwar, the chairman at ITC – India’s largest cigarette maker – who draws 439 times the median employee salary at the company.
Deveshwar is followed by N Chandrasekaran, the CEO and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest information technology services firm. Chandrasekaran – also one of the highest paid executives in the country – makes 416 times the median salary of TCS employees.
Mukesh Ambani – India’s richest man – gets paid 205.7 times more than the Rs 7.29 lakh median employee salary at Reliance Industries. Ambani, the chairman and managing director of RIL, has capped his remuneration at Rs 15 crore for the sixth year.
Here’s what the ratio looks like for some other companies:
This article was originally published on qz.com.