Salaries (net of inflation) in India Inc will go up by an average of 4.5 per cent during the coming financial year, 2003-04, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting.
This, the world's leading human resources consulting firm says, will be smaller than the average hike of 6 per cent the corporate world took home at the beginning of the current financial year.
Mercer has projected an average pay increase of 9 per cent for 2003-04 and an inflation rate of 4.5 per cent.
The net hike, thus, works out to 4.5 per cent. For 2002-03, salary hikes of 10 per cent, coupled with an inflation of 4 per cent, led to a net rise of 6 per cent.
However, the consulting firm is yet to give its verdict on which sectors will see better than average pay hikes and which will not. It is also working out the details of segment-wise pay hike in each industry group.
Still, the salary hikes in the country will be better than the hike of 1-3.5 per cent above inflation that employees in most other countries can expect to get, Mercer has said in the interim findings of its 2003 Worldwide Pay Survey.
Thus, while salaries (net of inflation) are expected to rise 1.6 per cent in the US, hikes will be of the order of 1.5 per cent in the UK, 1.5 per cent in Australia, 1.4 per cent in France and 1.6 per cent in Germany.
In the Asia-Pacific region, while stable economies like Japan (2.5 per cent), Singapore (3.2 per cent) and Hong Kong (2.9 per cent) are projected to offer lower salary hikes during the coming financial year, volatile economies like Indonesia (5.4 per cent), China (7.1 per cent) and India (4.5 per cent) are expected to offer higher increases.
"India has historically offered better hikes than the developed countries where the annual increments are more or less the same as inflation which, in any case, is much lower than in India," Mercer's country head, R Sankar, said.
The Mercer findings come a little over a month after Hewitt Associates, the global outsourcing and consulting firm, had predicted that salary increments for 2003-04 would be better than the increments handed out by companies at the beginning of the current financial year, thus pointing at a better corporate performance this year as compared to last year.
© 2025