Narayen has been ranked at the 5th and D'Souza at the 15th position in a list of 15 young CEOs, aged 45 or less. The list, published in the online edition of the US business magazine, has been topped by a person of Pakistani origin Nabeel Gareeb, who is the CEO of chipmaker MEMC Electronic Materials since April 2002.

In terms of age, D'Souza is the youngest of the 15 CEOs at 39. Gareeb is aged 43 and Narayen is 44, the report said.

However, Gareeb tops the list with an annual pay package of 79.6 million dollars, as against 12 million dollars of Narayen, who is the CEO of Adobe Systems since December 2007.

The annual total compensation for D'Souza, the CEO of Cognizant Technology since January 2007, has been put at 3.7 million dollars.

Gareeb is followed by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (45.9 million dollars) at the second, SL Green CEO Marc Holliday (30 million dollars) at the third and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz (13.5 million dollars) at the fourth place.

Noting that "young chief executives are becoming an endangered species", the report said that the number of CEOs aged 45 or less at the 500 largest listed companies in the US has dropped by more than half to 28 from 60 at the time of tech boom in 2000.

Just three CEOs among these are yet to reach their 40th birthdays, it noted.

The average annual compensation for these young CEOs at 9.2 million dollars also trails behind the average for all 500 companies at 12.8 million dollars.

However, the gap might be closing, the report said, as the overall CEO compensation after rising by 38 per cent in 2006, dropped by 15 per cent last year. At the same time, "the 28 youngsters under 45 collectively enjoyed a 5.9 per cent increase in overall compensation."

Nabeel Gareeb, who has topped the 45-and-under list, was also the sixth highest-paid CEO overall.

The report noted that many of these top-paid young CEOs rise from within "though it takes a lot of time to learn a business inside and out, earn the respect of the board, and perhaps the hardest of all, win the hearts of employees".

"Excluding four founding entrepreneurs, including 39-year-old Yahoo! chief Jerry Yang and Nvidia's Huang, the 45-and-under set spent an average of nine years climbing the ranks before moving into their corner offices."

The top paid five young CEOs are followed by Liberty Global's Michael T Fries (sixth with 11 million dollars), RR Donnelley & Sons' Thomas J Quinlan III (seventh with 6.5 million dollars), Huntsman's Peter R Huntsman (eighth with 5.4 million dollars) and Brown-Forman's Paul Varga and Danaher's H Lawrence Culp Jr jointly at ninth place (5.3 million dollars each).