Have American-style salaries reached India?

[OhioChick]

January 01, 2007 08:38 IST

A graduate of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology gets a salary offer of $100,000 (Rs 45 lakh). One from an Indian Institute of Management gets offered more than twice as much. Have American-style salaries reached India?

Yes and no. Those two job offers were for postings overseas, not in India. But many Indian companies, struggling to keep pace with a heated job market, are beginning to find that they have to pay salaries that are beginning to be comparable (after some adjustments) with those in wealthy countries.

Take the field of advertising. A fresh graduate from an American University who gets hired by a large, full-service advertising agency to service its clients in the US, is likely to get a starting annual salary of $25,000-$30,000.

His counterpart in India, if he joins one of the top 10 ad agencies in the country, will be offered a starting salary of Rs 3 lakh ($6,700).

Adjust for differences in purchasing power (Rs 45 in India buy you more than a dollar does in the US; true spending power equates Rs 10 with a dollar-which is what economists call adjusting for purchasing power parity, or PPP), and the two salaries become uncannily comparable.

http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/jan/01sal.htm


<snip> The moral of the story seems to be that if you are well-educated, have a successful career and hold down a good job in India, you are probably better off than your US counterpart.