Era,
Thanks for the update. Your observation is absolutely correct. I removed first few colums of ls -ltr output as they are not needed in my script. When I run command provided by you I do not get intended output.

ls -l | awk '{ tot[$2] += $1 } END { for (t in tot) printf "%s\t%i\n", t, tot[t] }'

354272 %ii
1 %ii

Thanks,
Prakash