Executive pay should ultimately be assessed over a long horizon, because a professional chief executive is hired not merely to produce one year’s profit but to strengthen the franchise, allocate capital, build organisational capability and compound shareholder value. The most useful question is, therefore, not who received the largest salary in a single year, but which professional leaders presided over the greatest creation of market wealth during the last five years.
Motilal Oswal’s 30th Annual Wealth Creation Study measures wealth created between March 2020 and March 2025 as the increase in market capitalisation, adjusted for corporate actions. Across the top 100 companies, the period produced a record Rs148 lakh crore of wealth. This is company-level wealth creation, not a claim that one individual caused every rupee of it. Sector cycles, promoters, boards, employees, regulation and the cost of capital all matter. Yet, where a professional CEO led throughout most of the period, the numbers provide a powerful indication of strategic execution.
Bharti Airtel ranked first, creating about Rs7.94 lakh crore of shareholder wealth. Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO of the company during the period, helped steer it through a decisive industry reset -- tariff repair, rapid data growth, balance-sheet discipline, 5G investment and expansion of digital and enterprise businesses. Airtel’s performance shows how a professional management team can convert a difficult competitive structure into durable value without relying on short-term cost-cutting alone.
ICICI Bank followed, with about Rs7.42 lakh crore of wealth created. Under Sandeep Bakhshi, the bank’s transformation centred on cleaner asset quality, calibrated risk, stronger profitability and a return to investor confidence. The lesson here is that wealth creation in financial services is not simply a function of loan growth. It comes from the quality and sustainability of that growth, particularly after a period of governance and credit concerns.
State Bank of India created roughly Rs5.59 lakh crore, which places it third. The period spans the leadership of Dinesh Khara and, from August 2024, C.S. Setty. SBI’s re-rating reflected improving asset quality, stronger earnings, digital scale through YONO and the unlocking of value across subsidiaries. It also demonstrates that professional wealth creation is not confined to privately owned companies; a public-sector institution can compound market value when management, balance-sheet repair and the operating environment align.
Leading the way
Bajaj Finance created about Rs4.21 lakh crore under the long-standing leadership of Rajeev Jain. Although the company is promoter-owned, its day-to-day growth engine has been built by professional management. Technology-led underwriting, cross-selling, distribution reach and disciplined risk pricing made the business one of India’s most closely watched financial compounders. Larsen & Toubro came next, led by S.N. Subrahmanyan, creating about Rs3.97 lakh crore, as investors rewarded sharper capital allocation, execution discipline and a stronger focus on core engineering and technology businesses.
Other major professional-led wealth creators included ITC (with about Rs3.77 lakh crore under Sanjiv Puri); HCL Technologies (with about Rs3.71 lakh crore under C. Vijayakumar); Mahindra & Mahindra (with roughly Rs3.06 lakh crore under Anish Shah); and NTPC (with about Rs3 lakh crore under Gurdeep Singh). Across sectors, durable strategy and disciplined capital allocation repeatedly mattered.
The most striking result for the capital-market industry is BSE, which emerged as the fastest wealth creator in the study. It delivered a 56-fold total return and a five-year CAGR of 124 per cent, while adding about Rs73,800 crore in market value. The leadership contribution, however, spans two tenures. Ashishkumar Chauhan served as BSE’s MD & CEO until 2022, during which time the exchange strengthened its technology platform, broadened its product strategy and laid the groundwork for the revival of its derivatives business.
Sundararaman Ramamurthy subsequently took charge and oversaw the next phase of growth. The outcome, therefore, reflects the cumulative impact of sustained strategic execution, operating leverage and renewed market confidence. It is particularly significant because executives at stock exchanges operate without the conventional equity-linked incentives available to CEOs at most listed companies.
Unlike BSE, NSE could not be ranked in the same share-price study, because it remained unlisted throughout the measurement period. After retiring from BSE, Ashishkumar Chauhan had returned to NSE as MD & CEO on 26 July 2022, more than two decades after serving on its founding team. He took charge four years back, when the exchange was emerging from a prolonged period of regulatory and governance controversy, including the co-location matter, the former leadership’s ‘Himalayan yogi’ episode and investigations into alleged phone interception. The leadership challenge was therefore twofold: to sustain the scale and profitability of NSE’s trading and clearing ecosystem while rebuilding institutional confidence, strengthening governance and technology resilience, and reviving a listing process that had remained stalled for years.
NSE’s value creation
That process has now moved decisively forward. NSE filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus on 17 June 2026 for a proposed offer for sale, subject to regulatory approvals and market conditions. Indicative quotations across unlisted-share platforms imply a market capitalisation of about Rs5 lakh crore. The Burgundy Private Hurun India 500 valued NSE at about Rs1.68 lakh crore in 2021. In early 2022, ‘Himalayan yogi’ and other scandals came out, bringing down NSE’s reputation and valuation. There were doubts in policy circles about continued business given the scale and repercussions of the scandals. NSE was valued at Rs1,68,200 crore ($22.5 billion) in late 2021/early 2022. Its market capitalisation is close to Rs5 lakh crore today. On that basis, the implied increase in private-market value during Chauhan’s tenure from 2022-26 is closer to Rs3.3 lakh crore – or value addition of more than Rs80,000 crore per year.
NSE’s value creation is also reflected beyond its indicative private-market valuation: in the profitability of its trading and clearing ecosystem, the strength of its technology infrastructure and the substantial value embedded in the holdings of institutional and individual shareholders.
Because NSE was unlisted, neither the Motilal Oswal study nor any listed-share-price comparison can provide a like-for-like ranking of its previous CEO tenures. Chauhan’s career, therefore, illustrates two distinct phases of institutional value creation: first through the transformation of BSE and subsequently through his leadership of NSE.
Taken together, his BSE and NSE tenures represent leadership across two of India’s most important market institutions, the combined current market value of which is well above Rs5 lakh crore (more than $50 billion). The significance is not simply the number. It points to a broader movement in corporate India towards professional CEOs, who can create substantial and durable wealth for shareholders, while strengthening the institutions they are entrusted to lead.
This comparison exposes India’s compensation paradox. Professional CEOs in ordinary listed companies can participate in the value they help create through stock options and restricted stock units. Leaders of exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories can generate exceptional institutional and shareholder value but cannot accumulate wealth through the same mechanism. India should preserve the independence of market infrastructure, yet develop equivalent long-term reward structures: deferred cash units, multi-year scorecards and rigorous claw-backs tied to resilience, governance and public-interest outcomes. The principle is simple. Pay should not follow title or headline profit alone; it should reflect the quality, durability and scale of value created.