Bajaj Finserv

In 2008 Bajaj engineered a strategic demerger of Bajaj Auto into three separate listed entities — Bajaj Auto (the vehicles business), Bajaj Finserv (the financial services arm) and a holding company — unlocking independent capital-allocation stories and setting up the later rise of Bajaj Finance as India's largest consumer-lending NBFC. The restructuring deliberately separated manufacturing risk from financial-services growth.

Bajaj progressively transitioned to non-executive and emeritus roles in his final years: stepping down as chairman of Bajaj Finserv in March 2019 to become chairman emeritus, and then in April 2021 ceding the non-executive chairmanship of Bajaj Auto to his cousin Niraj Bajaj while retaining the chairman emeritus title. The staged exit — cousin rather than son in the auto chair — was a deliberate signal of family-business governance beyond primogeniture.

On the Forbes 2016 list of the world's billionaires, Bajaj was ranked No. 722 with a net worth of about US$2.4 billion, reflecting the value created by the 2008 demerger and the rise of Bajaj Finance. He also held external roles including chairman of Indian Airlines, board chairmanship at IIT Bombay, and membership of Harvard Business School's South Asia advisory board and the Brookings Institution's International Advisory Council.

His sons Rajiv and Sanjiv Bajaj continued to lead separate arms of the group after his death — Rajiv as managing director of Bajaj Auto and Sanjiv as chairman of Bajaj Finserv — while daughter Sunaina Kejriwal (who died of cancer in 2024) directed the Kamalnayan Bajaj Hall and Art Gallery. The sibling split mirrored the 2008 demerger logic, with each heir holding a vertically-defined operating brief.