Treat employees as humans, reduce gap between highest and lowest salaries: Infosys founder Narayana Murthy

Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy

Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy on March 12 said that businesses and entrepreneurs need to treat employees as humans, reduce the pay gap between lowest and highest salaries, by embracing "compassionate capitalism."

One needs to uphold the respect and dignity of every corporate employee. "To praise people in public and criticize in private, and to the extent possible, to share the fruit of the corporation in a fair manner amongst all employees of the company," he added.

He said that the future India’s development and poverty alleviation will happen when the country’s businesses and entrepreneurs compassionately embrace capitalism. In the past, Murthy had faced flak for his comments on 70-hour work week, stressing on the need for young people in India to work hard to make the country a global leader.

Murthy, who was in conversation with former TiE Mumbai founding president Harish Mehta at the TiE Con Mumbai 2025, believes that the country can’t thrive in its present socialist mindset.

"Capitalism is all about providing opportunity for people to come out with new ideas to create wealth for themselves and their investors; to create jobs for people and thereby reduce poverty; and to contribute to taxes in the country so that a lot of public good work can take place," Murthy explained.

He further elaborated on the concept of "compassionate capitalism."

Murthy stressed the role of entrepreneurs as "evangelists" of capitalism, emphasizing that their conduct would determine how the concept is perceived in a country long accustomed to socialism.

"It is incumbent on every one of us to conduct ourselves in a way that those sceptics will also say, 'Yeah, there is something good in this thing called capitalism. There is something good in entrepreneurship.' And to do that, all of us have to become strong evangelists, and we have to walk the talk. Just saying great things and not doing them will not be sufficient," he said.

How Murthy walked his talk

Mehta shared an incident from the time when technology industry body Nasscom was started in India, with about 50-60 companies and accrued huge losses and expenses. Each company had to pay about Rs 25,000 each month to keep the organisation running -- back then a big amount.

When the losses eventually went up and Nasscom hadn’t accounted for it, Murthy stepped in to offer training programmes on IBM AS400 computers at Infosys campuses. Skills required to run these computers were in high demand back then in the IT industry.

“So, he conducted training programs at the Infosys campus on AS400, invited all his competitors. They can send their best software engineer for training, and the entire contribution of that was given to Nasscom to fund the losses. Now imagine you're inviting your competitors, best engineers, you train them to compete with you tomorrow,” said Mehta.

“But Murthy looked at the big picture. That Nasscom as an institute has to survive and grow. Because keeping India first, keeping industry first and in that sense, collaboration with competitors became a theme for his philosophy,y and of course it was again promoted by Nasscom,” he added.

Mehta was a founding member and first president at Nasscom while Murthy was then elected as the vice president.