The wide grin of the security guard at the Hero Enterprise office in Okhla brightens the cold smoggy evening. Indoors, through a corridor lined with eye-catching murals and paintings, you are smilingly ushered into a lounge where you can at once spot a Souza and Paresh Maity. Here, as I wait for the firm’s Chairman Sunil Munjal, two beaming attendants arrive with a tempting array of snacks – cakes, mathris, dry fruit, mixtures, cookies, and biscottis. One of them, Hari, says, he has been with the group since 1997 and the other younger one, Kamal, since 2004.
Interior of Hero Enterprise office, Okhla
When the industrialist and art patron arrives, I comment on his smiling staff, and he says attrition is one of the lowest in the company. He says he was delayed as he was held up at the printing press awaiting the first copies of ‘Table For Four’, a new book that he has co-authored with Doon School friends Ajay Shriram, Nitan Kapoor and the late Deepak Nirula.
A consummate storyteller, Munjal who had earlier written a business book on Hero Group founders’ enthralling journey from the bylanes of Kamalia in Pakistan to Ludhiana has now turned his pen to food tales. To be launched on 15 December in Goa at the Serendipity Arts Festival – the expansive cultural platform set up by Munjal – Table for Four features reviews of Delhi’s restaurants and also recipes and conversations with chefs.
Munjal, you learn, is a vegetarian by choice. “If you ask any global expert on environment and sustainability what is the one thing that you as an individual can do to impact the planet positively, the single answer will be ‘turn vegetarian’”, he says. Ask him which restaurant he would have met for Table Talk if not this meeting at his office, and without hesitation he picks Indian Accent.
Soft power
At the Serendipity Arts Festival, another exciting announcement this year will be on Brij Incubator – which supports early-stage cultural and craft-led start-ups. This is our third incubator, says Munjal, after the Munjal BCU Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MBCIE) in Ludhiana and one at the BML Munjal University campus in Gurgaon. “This (Brij) is an incubator and accelerator, which unlike the others that are focused on health tech and edtech and fintech, is purely focused on arts and culture, which is almost civilisational to us,” says Munjal, who is a big advocate of building up India’s soft power.
A note of passion in his voice, he says, “In the days when India had 26 per cent of world trade and 23 per cent of world GDP, what do you think we were exporting?”
Spices, you venture. “Spices, of course, but textiles, woodwork, crafts,” says Munjal. “So, we are trying to encourage the artisan families who, through the generations, are still making some of the old things to contemporise their skill so that they are globally viable.”
The big idea behind Brij which will have a campus of its own in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj, says Munjal, is to boost the rural economy through enterprises focused on traditional village-based arts and crafts, giving it an alternate commercial option other than agriculture. “Our idea is to find hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them, artisans across the country,” he says.
There are just a few days to go before the 10th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, and Munjal is charged up as he describes how the event has gotten really big this year. There will be over 250 projects put together by 35 curators at SAF and the event will bring together musicians, artists, dancers, performers, chefs, designers and storytellers in an explosion of creativity. While Munjal is reluctant to talk about investments, the Serendipity Arts Foundation that he has set up has given rich patronage to all forms of arts. “Culture builds empathy in an increasingly divided world,” says Munjal.
Since Munjal was also chairman of the Doon School Board of Governors till fairly recently, you can’t resist asking him if boarding schools are losing their relevance. “The best schools are still the boarding schools,” he insists. “You get a much more holistic training, education, and skilling plus learn life skills and ethos.. school taught me many things about life, about how to value people as people for themselves, and making relationships based on human values,” he says.
A new road
Since stepping down from the Hero Group, where he was the joint managing director of HeroMotocorp, in 2016, Munjal has been focused on Hero Enterprise as well as all the foundations of the Group. What had prompted the 2016 recalibration in the storied two wheeler group? “It was actually the second restructuring – there was one in my father’s generation and then this one in mine,” says Munjal, adding, “It was a conscious decision and amicably done as we felt it could provide more entrepreneurial energy. Otherwise, what happens is over a period of time, as the companies grow, and the number of members in the family grow, everyone doesn’t get an opportunity to play an active role. And too often, in many large business families, many individuals become either lazy or unproductive, which is a shame.”
Says Munjal, “I came away with some of the smaller companies, the insurance distribution, etc. Also, we did not restructure our foundations, which were all together and they all fell into my lap, too.”
The foundations do a lot of quiet work. “As a family, anywhere we set up a company, a factory, we try and work in multiple areas like education, health, gender issues, clean drinking water, and now arts and culture,” says Munjal, describing how there are 30,000 kids studying in the Group’s schools right now across different geographies.
On the business front, within Hero Enterprise, is Hero Insurance Broking that Munjal’s daughter Shefali runs. “She actually set it up and she chairs it,” he says. “Then there is a real estate business, Hero Realty, which has been low key, but we are hoping to build up in the next three to five years. We’re now ramping it up quite significantly, but only sticking to North India,” says Munjal. There is a steel cold rolling business and an active investment office too. “We invest in areas like financial services, in health, in consumer-facing businesses that use technology, and also in the very high end of manufacturing, technology and sustainability,” says Munjal.
Impact investing
Urging me to have some more masala tea, which he says his staff makes really well, the industrialist shares his philosophy on investment. “We see a lot about valuations being the measure of success of a start-up. I don’t think it’s the only measure and for us the impact that these companies make on society is a much more important thing,” he says, adding, “One of the criteria for us is to look at founders with great deal of integrity and good governance and businesses which will have a positive, outsized positive impact on society.”
Munjal, who founded the BM Munjal University in 2014, takes a very keen interest in education, having had board roles in several institutions including ISB and IIM-A and playing an active part in consultations with government, especially on the new education policy. “We have been actually recommending to the government for a while to create a GST type of council, taking all education ministers and secretaries of states together, and have the education minister of India share that, and figure out a way to implement both K-12 and higher education in right earnest, because it is a fantastic policy,” he says.
Ask him how the BM Munjal University is fostering innovation, and the industrialist mentions that a new Nvidia lab, perhaps the first of its kind in India, is coming up on the campus. Tentatively planned to be launched in either January or February 2026, the lab will be powered by an advanced NVIDIA DGX H200 system with 8×141 GB GPUs. It will be at the cutting edge of specialised research in AI.
From cycles to education to arts and AI, could there be an industrialist with a more diverse set of interests than Munjal? – you wonder as you take leave.
Published on December 8, 2025
