Employees have gained more than shareholders from India Inc's growth since the mid-1990s. And regardless of the numerous voluntary retirement schemes that companies have launched, India Inc's profits have not come at the expense of workers.

Data on the country's top 1,000 companies by sales turn common perceptions on their head. Except in the case of the top 100 companies, salaries and wages have actually grown more than net profits.

Ironically, it is in the public sector companies that wages and salaries have fallen as a proportion of net profits, because of the huge profits earned by the oil companies in the last few years.

For the top 1,000 companies, salaries and wages were 83.91 per cent of net profits in 1995-96, moving up to 96.02 per cent in 2002-2003.

For public sector companies, on the other hand, the comparable figure was 85.11 per cent in 1995-1996, and 59.40 per cent in 2002-2003.

Conversely, for the private sector companies in the top 1,000, salaries and wages as a percentage of net profit went up from 83.36 per cent in 1995-1996 to 132.79 per cent in 2002-2003. Clearly, employees have gained more than shareholders for these companies.

A contrary trend was, however, seen for the top 100 companies, where salaries and wages increased by 129.54 per cent during the period, while net profits rose by 144.41 per cent.

The upshot was that salaries and wages as a percentage of net profits for these corporates fell from 70.99 per cent in 1995-1996 to 66.67 per cent in 2002-2003.

Not that these companies were stingy towards their employees -- the rate of growth of salaries was higher than the average rate of growth of the other 900.

Also, the growth in PSU salaries and wages, at 105.13 per cent, was much lower than the average growth rate among the top 1,000 companies, and well below the 112.20 per cent growth notched up by private sector companies.

The top 1,000 companies were able to reduce their expenditure on salaries and wages as a percentage of sales, bringing it down from 6.74 per cent in 1995-1996 to 6.19 per cent in 2002-2003.

Interestingly, PSUs have been the most efficient in this regard, and their salaries and wages have come down to 4.58 per cent of sales, compared with 6.01 per cent of sales in 1995-1996.

However, for private sector companies in the top 1,000, the comparable figure has gone up from 7.14 per cent of sales to 7.35 per cent, possibly because of the rise in salaries in the information technology sector.