In India, we speak confidently of becoming global champions in AI, semiconductors and battery innovation. But are we ready to pay for the talent required to get us there?
Corporate India, particularly its promoter-led enterprises, still has a rigid compensation culture. Even the most admired Indian tech companies rarely exceed $1 million in fixed compensation for high-end domain talent, preferring to offer stock or deferred incentives instead. Across the board, executive pay continues to outpace technical pay by a wide margin—even in companies that market themselves as product-first.
Imagine a promoter approving even a tenth of Meta’s figure—say, $10 million annually—for a single hire in AI. HR would instinctively reach for the cost-to-company (CTC) template. Legal teams would load the contract with clawbacks and non-competes. And someone around the table would inevitably ask whether this was more than the entire tech team earns.
This reflects a discomfort with the idea that a young knowledge-led mind—often without pedigree, polish or deference—could command industrial-level value. It is a problem of culture. Indian businesses have long been comfortable investing $50 million in a new factory or plant. But offering even $5 million to a knowledge architect who can design the core of a future-facing product feels excessive.
This inversion, where management is rewarded more than the minds building the product, is one of Indian technology’s least acknowledged handicaps. It’s not because the talent doesn’t exist. India continues to produce some of the best AI researchers, quantum physicists and deep tech engineers in the world. But our systems expect them to settle for prestige, purpose or passion.
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There’s a persistent myth that because India’s tech talent is “mission-driven” and that it will accept under-compensation in return for vision or national pride. That might work if you’re a global frontrunner offering unmatched exposure. But when that same talent has offers from research labs in Silicon Valley, Zurich or Singapore—with salaries 8 to 100 times higher—purpose alone won’t bridge the gap.
Vision must be paired with valuation: Across the world, many governments and corporations understand this. The UAE has appointed a minister for AI. Singapore offers co-funded AI fellowships with public-private partnerships. Germany’s AI strategy includes billions in subsidies tied to industrial research teams. These are economic bets on the future of productivity.
India’s response so far has been largely declarative: strategies, mission and some funding. But talent doesn’t read these documents. It reads offers, options and opportunities.
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There is precedent for bold compensation in India’s business history. Two decades ago, during the retail boom, one of India’s largest conglomerates hired 15-plus marquee CEOs at salaries reportedly several times higher than their previous pay. It was a bold bet—one that catalyzed knowledge transfer, global systems and new processes. But once the infrastructure was built, the appetite for such talent faded. The notion that talent is fungible took root again. In deep tech sectors, that assumption won’t hold.
In the technology era, talent must be treated as strategic capital expenditure. Hiring a world-class AI researcher is like the first kilometre of pipeline in a new industrial system. Yet, most Indian promoters would find it ego-challenging to write that check unless the individual’s value could be directly tied to revenues already realized, or probably the talent is in their bloodline.
That mindset is precisely what could cost us the future.
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It’s no longer sufficient to celebrate Indian-origin AI leaders at DeepMind, Google or OpenAI. If we underpay the very talent we claim to revere, we aren’t reversing brain drain—we’re subsidizing innovation elsewhere.
And the problem runs deeper than compensation structures. Indian business culture still places enormous symbolic value on control, lineage and loyalty. It’s far more comfortable rewarding long-term insiders than investing aggressively in external experts.
But deep tech respects none of these traditional codes. It rewards only edge. The question is not whether India has the financial bandwidth but whether it has the emotional maturity to accept that true capability may reside in those who don’t conform to existing hierarchies.
Even India’s startup ecosystem hasn’t escaped this gravity. Founders flush with venture capital hesitate to offer globally competitive salaries to specialist talent. Many prefer to overhire generalists rather than back one game-changing domain expert.
Performance-linked employee stock options are useful but they’re no substitute for upfront recognition of value.
The test of the new economy is not regulation, nor market access. It isn’t equity capital either—these are traditional entry barriers that large Indian firms are comfortable overcoming. The real question is whether they can recognize that in a world of knowledge-driven industries, intellect is infrastructure.
The question then is no longer whether we can afford to pay top talent. It is whether we can afford not to.
The author is a corporate advisor and author of ‘Family and Dhanda’
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