Rahul Bajaj on Conglomerate Building

Under Rahul Bajaj's leadership the company's turnover grew from roughly ₹7.2 crore to about ₹12,000 crore, a more than 1,600x expansion across five decades. The growth was driven first by the Chetak's licensed-era dominance and then, after 2001, by the Pulsar-led motorcycle portfolio that recaptured share in the post-liberalization market.

His brothers — Shekhar, Madhur and Niraj — stood beside him across the group, building what the company memoir describes as a corporate bond grounded in trust, humility and shared values. The sibling partnership allowed the Bajaj Group to extend into electricals, steel (Mukand) and financial services without the public sibling feuds that defined several other Indian family houses of the era.

Rahul Bajaj took charge of the Bajaj Group in 1965 at the age of 27, inheriting an auto operation throttled by License-Raj capacity permits. Over the next five decades he scaled the flagship Bajaj Auto from roughly ₹7.5 crore in turnover to ₹12,000 crore, with the Chetak scooter carrying the lion's share of that growth during the 1970s and 1980s when waiting lists stretched for years.

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.

Over the decades that followed, Rahul Bajaj scaled Bajaj Auto from roughly ₹7.5 crore in turnover to about ₹12,000 crore — a 1,600x expansion that turned a License-Raj-era scooter licensee into India's largest two-wheeler exporter by the early 2000s. The Chetak remained the principal growth engine through the 1970s and 1980s, with the Pulsar franchise taking over post-2001.