Pawan Munjal: Hero MotoCorp Chief's Life Story

Key facts
Born	28 October 1954 [1]
Family roots	Munjal family from Kamalia, Punjab (now in Pakistan); settled in Ludhiana after Partition, where his father Brijmohan Lall Munjal built Hero Cycles [2] [3]
Education	Mechanical engineering, Regional Engineering College (now NIT) Kurukshetra, class of 1976 [4]
Family	Son of Brijmohan Lall and Santosh Munjal; brothers Raman Kant (died 1991), Suman Kant and Sunil Kant; three children, including Vasudha Dinodia, a Hero MotoCorp director [5] [6] [7]
Company	Hero MotoCorp (formerly Hero Honda Motors), Executive Chairman; the Munjal family owns about 34.7% [8]
Wealth	US$5.3 billion, “Pawan Munjal & family”, Forbes India’s Richest 2026 (as of 30 September 2026); Forbes India put it at US$5.65 billion in October 2025 [9] [10]
Known for	Running Hero Honda from 2001, buying out Honda in 2011 and rebuilding the company as Hero MotoCorp, by its own count the world’s largest two-wheeler maker by volume

On 16 December 2010, at a press conference in New Delhi, Pawan Munjal sat beside his 87-year-old father Brijmohan Lall Munjal, his brother Sunil and Honda’s Fumihiko Ike, and ended the most successful joint venture in Indian manufacturing history. Honda would sell its 26% stake in Hero Honda to the Munjals; the Japanese company’s name would come off the fuel tanks. “This is the most important announcement I have made in the last 25 years,” Munjal told reporters [11].

Many in the industry thought the Munjals had made a mistake. Honda had supplied every engine and every design for a quarter of a century. Hero had the factories, the dealers and the brand, but no research and development of its own. Honda, meanwhile, had its own Indian subsidiary and was about to compete directly against its old partner [12]. A few days after the announcement, an acquaintance met Munjal and heard him say, in Punjabi, “Even if I have to go down, I will go down fighting” [12].

He did not go down. Fifteen years on, Hero MotoCorp sells more than six million two-wheelers a year, has eight factories in three countries, earned Rs 5,268 crore in profit in the year to March 2026, and designs its own motorcycles in Jaipur and near Munich [13] [14]. Honda’s Indian arm has grown too, and in some months now outsells Hero, which is one reason the story is not simple [15].

Nor is Munjal’s own record. He has been India’s highest-paid listed-company executive, drawing Rs 122.31 crore in FY26, and has had more than three-quarters of institutional investors vote against his pay [16] [17]. He has been raided by the Income Tax Department and the Enforcement Directorate, prosecuted by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and then fully cleared by a tribunal, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court in that matter [18]. This is the full story of the engineer who inherited India’s best-known two-wheeler brand and had to rebuild it from the engine up.

Where it began

Pawan Kant Munjal was born on 28 October 1954, the third son of Brijmohan Lall Munjal and his wife Santosh [1] [5]. The family’s story is one of the great Partition-to-prosperity tales of Indian business, and it is told in full in our profile of Brijmohan Lall Munjal.

The short version: four brothers from Kamalia, a small town in what is now Pakistani Punjab, moved to Amritsar in the early 1940s to trade in bicycle parts, then shifted to Ludhiana after Partition. In 1956 they got a licence to make bicycles and started Hero Cycles with a bank loan of about Rs 50,000. By 1975 it was India’s largest bicycle maker, and in 1986 the Guinness Book of Records called it the largest in the world [2] [3]. “Way back in 1956, my father pedalled the first ever Hero bicycle around the yard and he was so excited,” Munjal said at a product launch decades later. “He set India on the move” [19].

Pawan grew up in Ludhiana in a joint family in which business, home and community life were hard to separate. Much of his schooling was at a boarding school. At his father’s prayer meeting in 2015 he recalled how the elder Munjal would arrive on visiting days: “I remember the whole dorm would be waiting for my parents to turn up” [20]. His father, who never went to college, was a stickler. The son’s letters home would come back marked up: “He would send them back with his corrections” [20].

He studied mechanical engineering at the Regional Engineering College in Kurukshetra, Haryana, now NIT Kurukshetra, graduating in 1976. Forty-two years later the institute gave him an honorary doctorate at its convocation, which is where the “Dr” in his title comes from, along with a second honorary degree from Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University the same year [4] [21]. Several websites claim he was born in Delhi in 1956 or studied at the Doon School; none of that is supported by the company’s own filings or by mainstream reporting, and we have not used it.

He went into the family business, and in the early years his job at Hero was unglamorous and formative: developing vendors and dealers, building the ancillary supply base and the dealer network [22]. It is the part of a two-wheeler company that outsiders never see and that later became Hero’s single biggest competitive advantage. “We have about 8,000-9,000 touchpoints across the country,” he said in 2022. “It is one of our biggest strengths. Why would we let go of that strength?” [23]

The first break

The break that defined his life came from his father’s boldest bet. In 1983 Brijmohan Lall Munjal, a bicycle maker with no experience of engines, signed a collaboration agreement with Honda Motor Company of Japan. Hero Honda Motors was incorporated in January 1984, with Honda and the Munjals holding 26% each and the public the rest [24]. The first plant came up at Dharuhera in Haryana, and in 1985 the first CD100 motorcycle rolled out [24] [25].

The CD100 arrived in a market dominated by heavy, thirsty scooters and motorcycles. A light, four-stroke bike that sipped petrol was a revelation for a country where fuel was expensive and wages were low. The company’s slogan, “Fill it, shut it, forget it”, became one of the most remembered lines in Indian advertising. The first million motorcycles took until 1994; the Splendor, launched in 1994-95, went on to carry the company’s sales for three decades [14] [25] [26].

Pawan moved from Ludhiana to Delhi to help set up the Honda venture, and it was there, taken to the Siri Fort range by a college friend, that he picked up golf, the game that would become his public signature [27].

The family paid a heavy price along the way. His elder brother Raman Kant Munjal, the first managing director of Hero Honda, died in 1991. Brijmohan Lall moved to Delhi to take direct charge, and Pawan, the third son, ran the day-to-day operations alongside him [28]. In 2001 he became managing director and chief executive of Hero Honda, the year the company became the largest two-wheeler maker in India, and, by its own count, in the world [29] [22].

The decade that followed was a golden one. Hero Honda’s Gurgaon plant opened in 1997, the CBZ in 1999 was India’s first 150cc motorcycle, the Pleasure scooter arrived in 2006 and a third plant at Haridwar in 2008 [26]. By the financial year ending March 2011, the last year under the Hero Honda name, the company sold 54 lakh two-wheelers, held 44.5% of the Indian two-wheeler market and 54.6% of motorcycles, and earned Rs 1,928 crore in profit on income of Rs 19,670 crore [30].

But under the surface, the partnership had soured.

Building the empire

The split with Honda

By the late 2000s, Honda wanted to grow its wholly owned Indian subsidiary, Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India, and was reluctant to share new technology with a venture it only part-owned. The Munjals chafed at paying royalty on every bike and at the limits on exports, since Honda sold its own products abroad. There was also a human factor. “There was a change of generation,” Munjal told Business Today in 2013. “By 2009-10 there were hardly any people from [the early] time, who had worked with us, who knew the family, the processes here, who knew this market, and who had that relationship and that emotional connect” [12].

Before the divorce from Honda could happen, the Munjals had to settle matters among themselves. In June 2010 the four branches of the extended family, descended from Brijmohan Lall and his three brothers, divided a group then valued at about US$4.2 billion. Brijmohan Lall’s family kept Hero Honda, Hero Corporate Services, Rockman and a few other firms. O.P. Munjal’s branch took Hero Cycles. Satyanand Munjal’s sons got Munjal Showa, Munjal Auto and Majestic Auto. The late Dayanand Munjal’s family, represented by Vijay Munjal, received Hero Exports and Hero Electric [31] [32]. One clause of that settlement, about who could use the word “Hero” on electric vehicles, would come back to haunt Pawan Munjal a decade later.

Then came 16 December 2010. Hero Investments, the Munjal holding company, agreed to buy Honda’s 26% stake at Rs 739.97 a share, a total of Rs 3,841.83 crore, at a time when the stock traded above Rs 1,500 [33]. Honda, in effect, sold at a discount of more than 50% to the market price in return for a clean exit and a licence fee [34]. To fund the purchase, the Munjals brought in the private equity firm Bain Capital and Singapore’s GIC, who together put roughly Rs 3,650 crore into Hero Investments for an indirect stake of under 15% in the listed company [34] [35]. Honda’s shares were transferred on 22 March 2011, and the promoter family’s combined holding rose to 52.21% [30] [35].

The price of independence was steep. Under a licence agreement signed in January 2011, Hero agreed to pay Honda about 45 billion yen, roughly Rs 2,450 crore, through June 2014 for the right to keep making existing models and a few new ones. The company booked Rs 1,928 crore for domestic rights and Rs 551 crore for export rights as intangible assets, amortised over 42 months [36] [30]. Royalty continued on four Honda-designed products until 2017 [37].

On 29 July 2011 Hero Honda Motors became Hero MotoCorp [30] [38]. On 9 August, in London, timed with an India-England cricket match, Munjal unveiled a new logo designed by Wolff Olins, the tagline “Hum Main Hain Hero” and an anthem by A.R. Rahman, with Ranbir Kapoor and Irfan Pathan joining Hrithik Roshan as brand ambassadors. “The new brand identity is born out of our desire to break the shackles and realise our potential,” he said [39]. “Everyone was watching us through a magnifying glass,” he told Business Today later. “We needed to do better” [12].

Building R&D from zero

The hardest problem was the one that could not be solved with a cheque. For 26 years, every Hero Honda had been designed in Japan. Now Munjal had until 2014 to learn how to design motorcycles. His promise to a supplier at the time was blunt: “We will get technology from wherever in the world, but we will make cutting-edge products” [12].

He went shopping. In 2012 Hero announced a tie-up with Erik Buell Racing, the American sport-bike maker founded by the former Harley-Davidson engineer Erik Buell, and in 2013-14 bought a 49.2% stake for US$25 million [40]. And it started building its own brain: the Centre of Innovation and Technology at Jaipur, an Rs 850 crore campus with a 16-km test track and more than 500 engineers, inaugurated in March 2016. “It’s a huge commitment from us in terms of investment that allows independent development of future technology,” Munjal said at the opening [41]. The first scooters developed entirely in-house, the Maestro Edge and Duet, had reached showrooms the year before [41]. In January 2019 came a second centre, Hero Tech Center Germany, near Munich, “a realisation of our aspiration to build an R&D eco-system that is spread across global geographies” [42].

Bain and GIC, meanwhile, got their reward. After Hero Investments was merged into the listed company in 2013, giving the investors direct shares, Bain sold 2.8% for about Rs 1,480 crore in June 2014 and a further 4.4% for about Rs 2,467 crore that November [43].

Factories at home and abroad

Munjal’s second answer to the Honda problem was scale, at home and abroad. The Neemrana “garden factory” in Rajasthan was followed by Hero’s first overseas plant, at Villa Rica in Colombia, inaugurated by President Juan Manuel Santos and Munjal on 9 September 2015, a US$70 million project with an initial capacity of 80,000 units a year. “It is a historic milestone for Hero MotoCorp as this facility in Colombia is our first plant outside of India,” he said [44]. A US$40 million joint venture plant in Bangladesh followed in 2017, then a Rs 1,100 crore plant at Halol in Gujarat the same year, and in March 2020 a Rs 1,600 crore plant at Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh, the eighth in all [45].

On 21 January 2021 the 100 millionth Hero two-wheeler, an Xtreme 160R, rolled off the line at Haridwar. The first million had taken nine years; the last 50 million took less than eight [14]. “We have been making in India, for the world,” Munjal said, and the board declared a special dividend of Rs 10 a share [14] [26].

Along the way there were changes at the top of the family firm. In June 2015 Brijmohan Lall Munjal, then 91, stepped back as Chairman Emeritus and Pawan became Chairman, Managing Director and CEO [29]. Five months later, on 1 November 2015, his father died [46]. “He will remain with us forever, in our hearts, guiding and inspiring us all into the future,” Pawan wrote in the next annual report [47]. His younger brother Sunil Kant Munjal left as joint managing director in 2016 under a family agreement dated 27 July 2016 that vested management and control of Hero MotoCorp in Pawan’s “family group”, an arrangement the company disclosed to the exchanges only in August 2023 [48] [6].

Harley, Zero, Ather and Vida

The third answer was partnerships, this time with Hero as the senior partner. When Harley-Davidson quit India in September 2020, Hero signed a distribution and licensing deal within weeks to sell and service Harleys and to develop a range of premium motorcycles under the American brand [49]. The result, the Harley-Davidson X440, built at Neemrana and co-developed at Jaipur, launched in July 2023 at Rs 2.29 lakh to Rs 2.69 lakh, aimed squarely at Royal Enfield [50]. The two companies extended the partnership in December 2024 to develop another motorcycle together [51].

Munjal was slow to commit to electric vehicles, and said so. “We are not in a hurry to showcase products,” he told Business Standard in 2018 [52]. Instead he bought a seat at the table: in October 2016 Hero invested about Rs 205 crore for a stake of roughly 26-30% in Ather Energy, a Bengaluru start-up that had not yet sold a scooter [53]. When Ather listed in May 2025, Hero booked a gain of Rs 722 crore on the dilution of its stake, which fell to about 29.6% [54]. In August 2026 it agreed to buy a further Rs 1,758 crore of Ather shares from early investors, on top of a Rs 1,000 crore preferential issue, taking its stake to about 32.8% [55].

Hero’s own electric scooter, the Vida V1, launched on 7 October 2022 at Rs 1.45 lakh and Rs 1.59 lakh. “We did not want to be the first but we wanted to be right,” Munjal said [56]. The brand name was not a marketing choice alone: the 2010 family settlement had given the “Hero” name for electric vehicles to his cousins’ company, Hero Electric (see Controversies below) [57]. In September 2022 the board also approved an investment of up to US$60 million in Zero Motorcycles of California to co-develop electric motorcycles [58]. The cheaper Vida VX2, launched in July 2025 from Rs 59,490 under a battery-as-a-service plan, finally gave Vida volume [59].

The numbers today, and the problem underneath

The year to March 2026 was Hero MotoCorp’s best ever on paper: standalone revenue of Rs 46,830 crore, up 15%; profit of Rs 5,268 crore, up 14%; 64.69 lakh vehicles sold; and a total dividend of Rs 185 a share [13]. The company also put Rs 720 crore into Euler Motors, an electric three-wheeler maker [13].

But the longer trend is the story investors and rivals talk about. Hero’s domestic two-wheeler market share was 44.5% in FY11 [30], 39% in FY16 [37], about 33% in FY23 [60], 30.8% in FY24 and 28.8% in FY25 by retail registrations [61]. In February 2025 Honda’s Indian arm outsold Hero in wholesale [62]. In FY26 Hero remained the largest brand at retail, with 60.8 lakh registrations against Honda’s 53.6 lakh, but TVS was the fastest-growing [63], and in September 2026 Honda topped the monthly retail table with 26.2% to Hero’s 24.3% [15]. Hero still owns the entry-level commuter, the Splendor above all; it has struggled in scooters, where Honda has long dominated, and in the premium motorcycles where Royal Enfield, whose turnaround we tell in our profile of Siddhartha Lal, and Rajiv Bajaj’s Pulsar family made their money.

How the wealth is held

The Munjal family’s wealth is almost entirely its 34.72% of Hero MotoCorp, held through a web of family vehicles rather than in individual names. Bahadur Chand Investments owns 20.0%; a partnership firm called BMOP, held in the names of Pawan Munjal, Renu Munjal and Suman Kant Munjal, owns 13.95%; Hero InvestCorp, the Pawan Munjal Family Trust and family members directly hold the small remainder. Foreign and domestic institutions own about 56% [8] [1]. Because the holdings are collective, Forbes lists the fortune as “Pawan Munjal & family”: US$5.3 billion as of 30 September 2026, ranked 54th among India’s richest, down from US$5.65 billion and 52nd place in Forbes India’s October 2025 list, and US$6.1 billion in 2024 [9] [10]. Forbes separately estimates Pawan’s own share at about US$1.9 billion [64]. We could not find him in published extracts of the 2025 or 2026 Hurun India Rich Lists and have not cited a Hurun figure.

The group has other arms. Hero FinCorp, the lender Munjal chairs, received SEBI’s approval in May 2025 for an IPO of Rs 3,668 crore [65]. Hero Future Energies, the renewables business, is led by his nephew Rahul Munjal [6].

The setbacks and failures

The Erik Buell bet failed quickly. EBR filed for receivership in Wisconsin on 16 April 2015, barely a year after Hero completed its US$25 million investment and with five Hero projects still on EBR’s drawing board [66]. Hero took the hit, then bought EBR’s consulting assets for about Rs 18 crore and brought the work in-house [38]. “Hero MotoCorp, with strong in-house R&D capabilities, remains confident that its future line-up would not be affected,” the company said [40]. It was a costly lesson in the limits of buying technology from a struggling partner, and it accelerated the Jaipur build-out.

The split with Honda also carried a hidden cost that took years to show up. Honda’s Indian subsidiary, freed from the venture, grew into Hero’s most dangerous rival, taking the scooter market almost entirely (Honda had 58% of scooters by 2016, according to Business Standard) and eroding Hero’s share year after year [37]. “It was Hero Honda. We spent a substantial amount of time, money and effort to build that brand,” Munjal said in 2013. “Now we were doing a new brand. And it is not like the other brand has gone away and disappeared. It has become much more aggressive” [12].

Labour relations frayed in 2013, when workers at the Gurgaon plant wore black armbands and threatened a hunger strike over wages, followed by unrest at Haridwar. The company suspended union office-bearers and filed police complaints, and Munjal blamed “indiscipline and insubordination” [67].

The years 2025-26 brought an unusual churn at the top. Niranjan Gupta, the chief financial officer who had become CEO in May 2023 when Munjal separated the chairman’s and CEO’s jobs, announced in January 2025 that he would leave on 30 April “to pursue other opportunities”, along with the chief business officer; Vikram Kasbekar, Hero’s first employee to join the board, became acting CEO [68] [69]. Several more senior executives left in the following weeks. The Economic Times reported that the exits followed a town hall at which Munjal had told managers “I have my eyes on each one of you”; the company called the reports “factually inaccurate” [70]. The company ran without a full-time CEO until Harshavardhan Chitale, a former Signify and Philips Lighting executive, took charge on 5 January 2026 [71] [16].

Tax disputes have piled up in the background: a Rs 456 crore GST demand over the classification of parts, which the company said “is not maintainable in law” and is appealing, among others [72].

Controversies and allegations

Pawan Munjal has faced more scrutiny from investigating agencies than most Indian industrialists of his generation. The record below is drawn from court judgments, exchange filings and agency statements as reported by wire agencies and major newspapers. Several matters are connected: nearly all trace back to Hero MotoCorp’s long-time event-management vendor, Salt Experience and Management Pvt Ltd (SEMPL), and to foreign currency carried abroad for Munjal’s trips.

The 2022 income-tax search and the “Rs 800 crore” claim

Allegation: On 23 March 2022 the Income Tax Department searched more than 35 premises in Delhi-NCR, including Hero MotoCorp’s offices and Munjal’s home. A week later the Central Board of Direct Taxes said, without naming the company, that a “prominent” automobile group had booked more than Rs 800 crore of expenses for services from an event-management entity that were “not for purposes of business”, routed through shell and paper companies, and that about 10 acres of Delhi farmland had been bought through paper companies with an unaccounted cash component of more than Rs 60 crore. Media reports citing unnamed officials put the figure at Rs 1,000 crore [73] [74].

Response: Hero MotoCorp told the exchanges on 29 March 2022: “The allegations made in the press report are not borne out of any document that have been served on us or our internal documents. Therefore, we categorically deny the speculative press reports.” It described itself as “a law-abiding corporate, with robust internal financial controls” [74].

Status: As of 9 November 2026, no assessment order, prosecution or formal closure arising from the search has been made public. The CBDT never named Hero or Munjal; the identification rests on the simultaneous search and press reporting.

The DRI foreign-currency case

Allegation: On 20 August 2018, Customs officers at Delhi airport seized about US$50,000 in undeclared foreign currency from Amit Bali, an employee of SEMPL who handled Munjal’s travel. Bali initially said the money belonged to Munjal. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence alleged that Munjal was the “beneficial owner” of currency carried abroad for his personal use, and in October 2022 filed a criminal complaint against SEMPL, Munjal, Bali and others under Section 135 of the Customs Act. A Delhi magistrate summoned Munjal on 1 July 2023 [18] [75].

Response: Munjal denied knowing that Bali was carrying the currency and said he had no shareholding or directorship in SEMPL, which was an independent company dealing with Hero at arm’s length [18].

What happened next:

• In November 2019 the Additional Commissioner of Customs dropped proceedings against Munjal, holding that the currency belonged to SEMPL. In July 2021 the Commissioner (Appeals) reversed that and imposed a penalty. On 28 March 2022 the Customs tribunal, CESTAT, reversed again and exonerated him [18].
• The Delhi High Court dismissed the department’s appeal against CESTAT on 5 October 2023, and on 26 April 2024 the Supreme Court dismissed the department’s special leave petition, making the exoneration final [18].
• On 3 November 2023 the High Court stayed the criminal summons [75]. On 24 July 2024 Justice Manoj Kumar Ohri quashed the complaint and summons against Munjal altogether, holding that a prosecution cannot continue once the accused has been exonerated on merits in adjudication, that “nothing has been placed on record to show that the foreign currency was being carried” for him, and that continuing the case would be “an abuse of the process of law”. DRI’s own counsel conceded he had no effective control over the currency [18] [76].

Status: Quashed as far as Munjal is concerned. We found no report of the DRI or the Union government challenging the July 2024 judgment in the Supreme Court as of 9 November 2026.

The Enforcement Directorate’s money-laundering case

Allegation: Using the DRI complaint as the predicate offence, the Enforcement Directorate registered a case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and on 1 August 2023 searched 12 premises, including two Hero MotoCorp offices and Munjal’s home. It said it seized about Rs 25 crore in cash, gold and jewellery and alleged that SEMPL had “illegally exported foreign currency equivalent to about Rs 54 crore” between 2014-15 and 2018-19, “ultimately used for the personal expenses” of Munjal, with about Rs 14 crore drawn in the names of SEMPL employees to get around the US$250,000-a-year limit of the Liberalised Remittance Scheme [77]. On 10 November 2023 the ED provisionally attached three plots of land in Delhi worth Rs 24.95 crore [78].

Response: Hero MotoCorp’s filing on the day of the search said officials “visited two of our offices in Delhi and Gurugram and the residence of our executive chairman Dr Pawan Munjal… We continue to extend all cooperation to the agency” [79]. Munjal went to court. His counsel, Mukul Rohatgi, argued that the entire case rested on the DRI complaint, which had already been stayed. Munjal also offered to deposit Rs 25 crore as a provisional measure against the seized assets [80] [81].

What happened next:

• On 17 November 2023 Justice Saurabh Banerjee of the Delhi High Court stayed the ED proceedings against Munjal, while allowing the agency to proceed against others [80].
• The predicate DRI complaint was quashed in July 2024 (above) [18].

Status: Pending. As of 9 November 2026 we found no final order on Munjal’s petition to quash the ED case, no prosecution complaint naming him, and no confirmation of the attachment by the PMLA adjudicating authority. The last confirmed position is the November 2023 stay, with the underlying Customs case since quashed. Reports in some outlets of a “look-out circular” against Munjal could not be verified from any court record or agency statement.

The corporate affairs ministry and GST probes into SEMPL

Allegation: In June 2023 Reuters reported that the Ministry of Corporate Affairs had ordered an investigation, after a preliminary inquiry by the Registrar of Companies, into whether funds were diverted from Hero MotoCorp through a third-party vendor and whether Hero controlled it [82]. The ministry later confirmed the probe was into SEMPL and Hero MotoCorp under the Companies Act [83]. Separately, in August 2023 Reuters reported that the Directorate General of GST Intelligence was examining about Rs 90 crore of allegedly false expenses booked by SEMPL that gave Hero a tax credit, with suspected evasion of about Rs 16 crore [84].

Response: Hero said in June 2023 that it had received no communication from the ministry, and in August 2023 that “there is no ongoing investigation against” the company [82] [84].

What happened next:

• In March 2025 Moneycontrol reported, citing government sources, that the ministry’s report had found no corporate-governance violation or diversion of funds. The same day the ministry issued a statement that “the report is under examination and no final conclusion should be drawn in this matter at this stage” [83] [85].

Status: No final decision of the ministry has been published as of 9 November 2026. The outcome of the GST inquiry has not been reported.

The Brains Logistics forgery FIR

Allegation: On the orders of a magistrate, Delhi Police registered an FIR on 5 October 2023 on a complaint by Roop Darshan Pandey of Brains Logistics, a former manpower contractor whose contract ended in 2010, alleging that Hero MotoCorp, Munjal, Vikram Kasbekar and others had created fake bills of about Rs 5.9 crore for 2009-10 and claimed a false tax credit [86].

Response: Hero called Pandey a “disgruntled service provider” and said the dispute was civil; an arbitrator had already awarded Brains Rs 70 lakh in 2018 in a dispute that remained under challenge [86].

What happened next:

• On 12 October 2023 the Delhi High Court stayed the FIR and the magistrate’s order; a second attempt to register an FIR was stayed by a division bench in July 2024 [86].
• In January 2025 a division bench held Pandey guilty of criminal contempt for a public notice attacking the court, described him as “a habitual litigant” and sentenced him to two weeks’ simple imprisonment [87].

Status: The stays were last reported in force; a final order on the quashing petition has not been reported as of 9 November 2026.

Hero versus Hero: the fight over the brand for electric vehicles

Allegation: The 2010 family settlement gave the right to use “Hero” on electric vehicles to the branch of the family that owns Hero Electric, run by Naveen Munjal. When Hero MotoCorp prepared its own EVs, Vijay Munjal’s side went to the Delhi High Court in 2021 seeking to stop it using the name [57]. Hero MotoCorp had itself sued Hero Electric over the trademark in 2019 [88].

Response: Hero MotoCorp said “there is a family understanding in place, which everyone in the Munjal family is well aware of” [57], branded its scooters “Vida, powered by Hero”, and argued before the arbitral tribunal that it had invested about Rs 400 crore in EVs and roughly Rs 7,000 crore in the Hero brand over ten years [89].

What happened next:

• In February 2022 the High Court declined an injunction and sent all disputes under the family settlement to a tribunal of three retired judges headed by Justice Dipak Misra. On 30 June 2022 the tribunal refused Hero Electric’s plea for an interim injunction, allowing Hero MotoCorp to use the Hero name on its EVs for now [89].
• Hero Electric itself was admitted to insolvency in December 2024 and ordered into liquidation by the NCLT in March 2026 after its creditors deadlocked [90].

Status: The tribunal’s final award has not been made public as of 9 November 2026. In practice Hero MotoCorp sells its electric scooters as Vida.

Pay and governance

Allegation: Proxy advisers have repeatedly objected to Munjal’s remuneration and to the concentration of power in a combined chairman-CEO. Ahead of the August 2021 AGM, Stakeholders Empowerment Services recommended voting against both his re-appointment and his pay, noting that it equalled 2.93% of standalone profit against a Nifty-company norm of about 0.9%, made up 88.76% of the whole board’s pay and was 826 times the median employee’s, with “no absolute cap on the variable pay” [91].

Response: The company’s AGM notices say his pay is linked to profit, with commission capped at 1% and total pay at 2.5% of net profit under the listing regulations [1]. In November 2023 the board accepted his offer of a voluntary 20% cut in fixed salary from January 2024, having separated the chairman’s and CEO’s roles earlier that year [92]. In 2026, seeking a further five-year term from 1 October 2026, he “voluntarily agreed to a further 15% reduction in fixed remuneration”, which the company said would bring the fixed component to about Rs 46.65 crore a year [1].

What happened next:

• At the 4 August 2021 AGM, 77.67% of public institutional votes were cast against his remuneration; the resolution passed with 60.36% overall only because the promoters’ 34-35% was voted in favour [17] [93].
• His total pay nonetheless rose: Rs 84.35 crore in FY22, Rs 99.55 crore in FY23, Rs 109.41 crore in FY24 and FY25, and Rs 122.31 crore in FY26, about 789 times the median Hero employee’s Rs 15.51 lakh and 2.32% of profit, nearly double the next-highest-paid automaker chief [1] [16].
• In May 2026 the board re-appointed him Executive Chairman for 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2031, subject to a special resolution at the 5 August 2026 AGM, required because he is over 70 [94] [1].

Status: The 2026 re-appointment and remuneration resolutions were put to shareholders on 5 August 2026; we could not read the scrutiniser’s report and so do not report the vote. He continued as Executive Chairman as of 9 November 2026.

Giving back

The Munjal family’s philanthropy is organised around institutions rather than headline cheques. The Raman Kant Munjal Foundation, set up in 1992 in memory of Pawan’s elder brother, runs the Raman Munjal Vidya Mandir school at Sidhrawali on the Delhi-Jaipur highway, with about 1,700 pupils, roughly two-thirds from Hero employee families, along with remedial education centres and skills programmes for women and girls, including one that has taught more than 8,000 girls to ride scooters [95]. BML Munjal University, opened in 2014 at the same site and named after his father, counts Pawan among its founders; his nephew Akshay Munjal is pro-chancellor [21].

Hero MotoCorp’s own CSR spend was Rs 80.54 crore in FY25, reaching 8.47 lakh people through “Hero We Care” programmes in education, road safety and the environment, and Rs 97.30 crore in FY26 [96] [97]. When Covid-19 struck in March 2020, the Hero Group companies pledged Rs 100 crore, half to PM-CARES. “We are humbled in making this contribution,” Munjal said [98]. In the EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List of 2019, Pawan Kant Munjal appeared at 59th with donations of Rs 11 crore [99]; he has not featured in the published top tiers of later lists.

His most visible giving is to sport. Hero has title-sponsored the Indian Open golf tournament since 2006 and the Women’s Indian Open since 2010 [100]; in 2014 it became title sponsor of Tiger Woods’s Hero World Challenge, extended in December 2024 through 2030 [101] [102]. It also sponsors the Hero Dubai Desert Classic, renewed for a fourth year in January 2026 [103], and for a decade bankrolled Indian hockey, bringing the 2010 men’s World Cup to Delhi and signing a four-year deal with the FIH in 2013 [104]. In 2019 he became the first Indian inducted into the Asia Pacific Golf Hall of Fame [100]. He insists the game is a passion rather than a networking tool: “I play for fun and do not hold a handicap,” he told Golf Digest India. “I do not do business on the course” [27].

He was elected president-designate of the Confederation of Indian Industry in May 2022, then stepped down two months later citing “domestic and global business commitments” [105] [106]. He sits on the board of the Indian School of Business and formerly on that of IIM Lucknow [1] [21].

Succession

Munjal turned 72 in October 2026. His current five-year term as Executive Chairman, approved by the board in May 2026, runs to September 2031 [94]. He has handled the question of what comes after in two ways.

The first is professional management. “His elevation to the role of CEO is a testimony to the robust succession planning process we have put in place within the Company,” he said when Niranjan Gupta became CEO in 2023 [69]. That experiment ended within two years, and after eight months without a full-time CEO the company hired Harshavardhan Chitale, an outsider with no two-wheeler experience, in January 2026 [71]. The board’s 2026 case for re-appointing Munjal rested on continuity at what it called a “critical inflection point”, with Vida, the Harley-Davidson and Zero partnerships and the Ather and Euler stakes all mid-flight [1].

The second is family. Munjal has three children; the eldest, Vasudha Dinodia, founded the chocolate brand Choko La in 2005 and joined the Hero MotoCorp board as a non-executive director in November 2021, where she chairs the sustainability and CSR committee and was re-elected in August 2025 with 98.45% of votes [7] [97] [107]. His brother Suman Kant Munjal is a non-executive director. The wider third generation runs the group’s other arms: Rahul Munjal at Hero Future Energies and Abhimanyu Munjal at Hero FinCorp (both sons of the late Raman Kant), Akshay Munjal at BML Munjal University and Hero Vired [6] [21]. No successor to Pawan at Hero MotoCorp has been named.

What their journey teaches

Build the thing your partner will never give you. For 26 years Hero took Honda’s engines and grew fat on distribution. The moment the partnership ended, the missing capability, design, became an existential problem. Munjal’s Rs 850 crore Jaipur centre and the German tech centre came a quarter-century after the company’s founding, but turned out to be the difference between survival and decline. Whatever your business depends on someone else for, start building it before you need it.

Pay for a clean break, then move fast. The Munjals paid Honda about Rs 3,842 crore for its stake plus roughly Rs 2,450 crore in licence fees, and gave Bain and GIC a slice of the company to fund it. Within eight months the new brand, logo and ambassadors were in place. Dragging out a separation to save money usually costs more.

Distribution is a moat, but it is not a product. Hero’s 9,000 touchpoints kept it No. 1 in India for 15 years after the split. They did not stop its market share sliding from 44.5% to under 30% as Honda took scooters and Royal Enfield and Bajaj took premium bikes. A channel advantage buys time; only products keep customers.

Being cleared is not the same as being untouched. Munjal won the Customs case at every judicial level, up to the Supreme Court. Yet the ED, GST, corporate affairs and income-tax inquiries that grew from the same facts have run for years, sent the stock down by as much as 6-7% on raid days [73] [108], and remain unresolved. For a public-company chairman, the arm’s-length handling of personal expenses and vendor relationships is governance, not housekeeping.

Shareholder votes are a signal, even when you win them. In 2021 nearly four in five institutional votes went against his pay, and the resolution passed on promoter votes. Two voluntary pay cuts followed, yet the total kept rising with profit. Promoters who control the vote still have to persuade the people who set the share price.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 9 November 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.

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