Luxury spa therapies, limousine rides home, champagne on ice, free weekend breaks and international schooling for the children: the senior Indian executive has never had it so good.

In a fiercely competitive corporate environment, where the top talent has its pick of jobs and is already commanding big Western-style pay packets, employers in India are having to pamper their best workers to keep them loyal.

The result is a nascent perks culture where the extras are becoming the norm and the trimmings ever more lavish. A whole new climate is pervading the corporate world, offering incentives to keep staff, said Mithu Basu, of the Leela hotel group.

“It is not only money the executive is seeking but a feel-good factor. Indians are globalising. They’re intellectual, monied people, who have tasted the best and are demanding it.”

The Leela Palace in Bangalore is in the vanguard of the emerging trend. It is the most expensive hotel in India and is also in the middle of the country’s IT hub, where the explosive demand for skilled professionals to service global software needs has pushed salaries to unprecedented levels.

Dom Perignon on arrival, cigar and cognac evenings, foie gras dinners and private butlers are just some of the extras being demanded by companies for their employees on business trips.

Many are throwing in add-on weekend packages for executives and their spouses to ease the hardship of being on the road. The shift in the workplace balance of power has occurred as India’s ability to train people has lagged behind its human resource needs in a booming economy.

The country’s universities and business schools may be churning out millions of graduates each year but few yet have the experience to lead management teams. The result has been a skills crunch at senior level, rampant wage inflation and a high turnover of staff.

The problem is affecting India’s world-renowned IT industry particularly badly. In the sector companies can expect as much as a quarter of their workforce to defect to the competition each year. By 2010, the Indian outsourcing sector will face a shortage of 350,000 professionals, according to a report by McKinsey, the consultants, and Nasscom, the industry’s representative body.

The soft benefits could make all the difference in convincing a bright young talent to stay. To help to make its software engineers feel more valued, Infosys’s IT park in Mysore includes a hair salon, sauna, gym, putting green, swimming pool and boating pond.

Top Indian executives can command as much as their Western counterparts and enjoy the trappings of the wealth at a fraction of the living costs. On the basis of purchasing power, some Indians are earning more than their American and European

peers. Zubin Shroff, the managing director of Talent Management Group, an IT recruitment company, says that even small to mid-sized companies are offering between $400,000 (£200,000) and $500,000, with bigger companies prepared to pay $600,000 to $1 million.

“Even in the US, that’s a fantastic salary,” he said. “We just placed a senior executive from a multinational into an Indian company and he got a Mercedes for joining. These things are clearly given as a move up in life.”

Wealth gap

The Leela in Bangalore is one of India’s most luxurious hotels and the first choice of many business visitors to India's Silicon Valley

Its executive suites boast massage showers, marble bath and personal butler service as standard

A five-night Sunday to Friday stay costs 102,000 rupees (£1,250)

86 per cent of Indians live on less than £1 a day; 44 per cent on less than 50p

One quarter of the country's population cannot afford to eat adequately

The wealthiest 10 per cent of Indians possess 33 per cent of the nation’s wealth. The poorest 10 per cent hold only 3 per cent

Sources: www.theleela.com; Stanford University; World Bank

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