If one were to add the golden goodbye in sectors like pharma and FMCG companies, the total would exceed 70,000.

To be sure, there is no foolproof way of ascertaining the correct numbers since there is no single agency monitoring the number of retirees (the central labour department has statistics of public sector units only while state labour departments have no records on VRS).

Tisco leads the list, having offered VRS to 19,000 employees while Siemens and Philips offered golden handshake to over 2,000 employees each. At the other end of the spectrum, there arecompanies like Otis and Blue Star which shed 240 and 500 employees respectively.

In the recast ``game,'' the engineering sector is followed by pharmaceutical companies which account for a substantial chunk of employees who opted for VRS.

Big-scale VRS in the pharmaceutical sector began when Ciba Geigy retired over 1,400 employees in the early 1990s. Ciba was followed by other major pharmaceutical companies almost without exception, bringing the total number of voluntary retirees to well over 22,000.

Trade union leaders have termed many VRS offers as CRS (compulsory retirement schemes), but they have been unable to stem the rush for such schemes because companies have grown smarter in structuring separation packages. In recent years, early bird incentives have been thrown in to force wavering employees to decide fast. Siemens, Philips and Hindustan Lever have all offered early bird incentives while Rhone Poulenc went a step ahead and gave out tolas of gold to each retiree at its Bhandup unit in Mumbaiwhere a majority of employees were women.

Says All India Blue Star Employees Union secretary N Vasudevan, ``Workmen accept the packages without taking into account the eroding value of money over the years.''

The companies, for their part, say they do not have much of a choice as rising competition is forcing them to be leaner. Says Siemens India managing director Jurgen Schubert on the series of voluntary retirement schemes that the company has had in the last three years: ``Reduction in our staff has helped us reorganise our processes. The non-core processes have been outsourced resulting in improved quality and cost efficiency. The retiring employees have improved production per employee--multiple skills have improved and Siemens has got a great skill mix now.''

Advocate Asif Mulla, an expert on structuring VRS, says: ``VRS is a route found out to skip the legal prohibitions against a lockout or a retrenchment as mentioned in section 25(O) of the Industrial Disputes Act. It often amicably settles thedues of employees.''

According to Nocil vice-president AB Modgil, ``restaffing of business organisations is compulsory due to the rising competition, improving technologies and greater pressures on the bottomline.''

The mantra is raising productivity with a leaner employee structure. Says Tisco's official spokesperson Sanjay Singh: ``Reductions in Tisco staff started off in 1993-94 when the company realised that it cannot afford its style of functioning. The idea at Tisco now is to increase productivity per employee.''

The same sentiment was echoed by a Hoechst senior manager (personnel & HRD) when he says: ``We have been able to reorganise our assembly lines through a series of VRS... We were able to upgrade our technology in certain older plants and increase the strength of employees in our new plants.''

FMCG giant Hindustan Lever has retired over 9,000 employees mostly in companies that it has acquired, including Brooke Bond, Tomco, Industrial Perfumes and Lakme besides Levers' own factories inspite of the increase in volumes of production.

There is, however, a negative side to the picture to the whole business or VRS and restructuring. ``Besides loss of work, retirees have so much else to put up with. Even schools do not want to admit a child whose father has lost his job,'' says R Shankarnarayan, an employee of Oswal Petrochemicals. The proposed VRS at Oswal Petrochemicals will cover Shankarnarayan.

All India Chemical Workers' Union president GR Ghanolkar feels companies are not always playing fair with workers. Says he: ``Pharma companies prefer to undertake manufacturing on a loan licensing basis, whereby a company takes a piece of land on lease and gives the manufacturing right to an outside agent for a particular product without conforming to FDA norms. The government is turning a blind eye to the situation. The government should intervene each time a company wants to close shop or restructure its operations.''

The idea of VRS got official government sanction in the 1992 Union budgetwhen the then finance minister Manmohan Singh suggested that companies which had gone bankrupt or were unviable could trim their flab and reach an amicable settlement with employees.

Later in August the same year, a memorandum of understanding was signed between the finance ministry and income tax department to incorporate section 2BA in the Income Tax Act of 1962 by which a retiring employee will be eligible for tax exemption up to a limit of Rs 5 lakh if he took a VRS. An employee is eligible for the tax exemption only once.

``The income tax department is only in charge of seeing if the tax exempt amount is disbursed on the date applied for and if an employee is taking the VRS for the first time. We are not responsible to find out whether the unit (which is opting for VRS) is viable or the employees are being forced to quit,'' says income tax commissioner (Mumbai) KVN Pai.