In India, it seems like real estate companies are following a different trend for compensating their top management. During 2009, many company CEOs took massive pay hikes, but now they have chosen to either forego their hikes, or at least take modest ones this year, when the sector is doing much better.

Last year, CEOs of few companies like HDIL’s Sarang Wadhawan and Unitech’s Sanjay Chandra came under scathing criticisms from the media. It is hard to believe that in the recession time period of 2008-2009, Chandra got a raise of about 60% whereas Wadhawan got an increment of a whopping 200%.

However, this year the story is quite different. Wadhwan and Chandra both are somewhere at the same salary levels as previous year, thus Unitech’s MD annually earns Rs 1.71 cr. and Rs 6 crore for HDIL’s Wadhawan.

Other than these CEOs, JC Sharma of Sobha Developers took a 25% increase this year, quite modest one. Also, the MD of Puravankara Projects and Godrej Properties, Mr. Ashish Puravankara, scaled up by about 43% annually.