The Force is with Firodia

The pune-based auto tycoon is carrying forward his father’s legacy of transformative mass travel.

- Samar Srivastava

Ask for a meeting with Abhaykumar Firodia and you hear back within hours. Exact timings are given. The directions to his office in Pimpri-Chinchwad, an industrial cluster on the outskirts of Pune, are short and crisp. Once there, the meetings proceed with clockwork precision.

This discipline is hardly surprising given that Firodia has had a long history of collaborating with the Germans. “Over the years, dealing with the Germans, their purity of technical thought, their dedication to quality—they’ve became part of the operating DNA of our company,” says Abhay Firodia, 72, chairman of Force Motors. Spend time with him and it becomes clear that the ethos has seeped into the organisation.

It is also evident that he’s not afraid to speak his mind. Just a day before Forbes India met him in September, he’d spoken out on the ad-hoc nature of the Supreme Court imposed ban (which was lifted in August after the imposition of a new tax) on diesel cars (above 2000 cc) at the annual meeting of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers. “The courts and the green brigade have to engage the country in a manner that is constructive,” he says. “Bans won’t necessarily solve things.” He was also concerned that the industry would have trouble in meeting the new Bharat Stage IV emission norms that are due to be implemented by April 2017.