Infosys internal feud all about investors, no one bothers about employees

A fight has broken out in Infosys between the Vishal Sikka appointed as CEO 3 years ago (June 2014), and the group of founders led by Narayanamurthy.

In 2015, Rajiv Bansal, Chief Finance Officer was paid a bonus of Rs 17.38 crores when he was relieved from Infosys. In 2016, the Chief Compliance Officer David Kennedy was given a severance package of Rs 6 crore. Infosys had said that those sums were paid to keep company secrets safe. Narayanamurthy asks whether those sums were paid to hide malpractices.

Vishal Sikka has announced that by the year 2020, he will increase the yearly revenue by two fold to $2000 crore, increase the profit ratio to 30% and increase revenue per employee to $80,000. In the background of the current economic crisis, this translates to reduction in the number of employees and their compensation. At the same time, annual salary of Vishal for the year 2015-16 has been increased to Rs 49 crore.

Vishal Sikka

In the feud with Vishal Sikka the worry of Narayanamurthy is to safeguard the interests of the shareholders and investors. Narayanamurthy has therefore spoken nothing about the announcement by Infosys that 9,000 employees have been retrenched in 2016. Recruitment of new employees also has gone down significantly because of automation. In the first 9 months of this fiscal year, Infosys recruited only 5,700 employees, just one third of the figure for last year (17,000).

Accumulating more cash by laying-off employees, reducing salary hikes and cutting down new recruitments, Infosys plans to use it for share buyback enriching its shareholders. Employees whose hard work earned this money for the company are ruthlessly exploited to maximize profit for shareholders.

The software industry, that set sail in India as part of globalization usurping or polluting agricultural lands, destroying small scale industries, mortaging the domestic food economy to multinational speculation, has now run aground. Corporates from US, Europe and India will decamp with their investments and profits. Modi government is ready to do everything to facilitate their escape.

Thousands of ordinary employees and the lakhs of youngsters who spent lakhs of rupees for engineering education in the hope of getting into software industry will be stranded. The suit-booted sharks are fighting among themselves for their share of the spoils.

What are we going to do?