The 2025 Spencer Stuart India Board Index has three headline numbers that read like progress:
- Average BSE 100 board size is down 15% since 2019 (11.3 to 9.8 directors)
- Independent director pay is up 90%, independent chair pay up 121%
- Women now hold 20.4% of board seats, up from 16.3%
Read on their own, these look like a governance upgrade: smaller, better-paid, more diverse boards. But one finding sits underneath all three and complicates the story.
Where the chair is executive:
- Boards with an independent-director majority have fallen from 90% to 68% since 2019
- Average independent director tenure has dropped from 6.2 years to 4.1
Directors are rotating faster exactly where an executive chair already holds more influence over the room. I've spent enough time on the operating side of board questions (IT strategy, portfolio spend, vendor governance) to know that influence isn't the same as headcount. A newly appointed independent director needs time to learn where decisions actually get made before their independence means much in practice.
There are countervailing signs: fully independent audit committees are up from 44% to 61%. But 23 BSE 100 and 52 BSE 200 companies still combine chair and CEO despite SEBI's now-voluntary push to separate the roles.
If tenure keeps compressing precisely where structural independence is already thinner, what does that do to board continuity, institutional memory, and the ability to actually push back when it counts?