In the glittering environment of a five-star ballroom in central Bengaluru, the heavy mechanics of long-distance Indian transportation momentarily collided with high corporate ceremony. It was September 4, 2026. Outside, the monsoon humidity hung thick over the tech capital’s ring roads, where passenger cars, two-wheelers, overloaded tippers and interstate delivery vans jostled for lane space. Inside, beneath muted chandeliers, stood a gleaming scale model of the Volvo 9600, a multi-axle luxury coach in 'Tall-Boy' design, which in popular public opinion arguably symbolises the closest thing India has to an executive luxury sleeper.
The occasion was the formal key handover commemorating a purchase of 150 such buses by Vijayanand Travels Private Limited, the private mobility arm founded in the northern Karnataka hub of Hubballi. In the commercial vehicle trade, fleet deals of this scale are rare; in the rarefied segment of premium sleeper coaches costing upwards of a crore and a half rupees apiece, the transaction marked the largest single order ever placed by a private operator with Volvo Buses India. Remarkably, 70-80 of these coaches were commissioned with factory-integrated onboard washrooms; a bespoke engineering concession designed to enable non-stop journeys across arteries like the 1,900-kilometre Bengaluru–Jodhpur run, long considered among the country's most gruelling scheduled bus routes.
Among those present on the dais stood B. Srinivas, who, on April 1, 2026, had assumed the office of Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of VE Commercial Vehicles Ltd (VECV). He began with an unscripted, self-deprecating confession about a conversation he had held with Shiva Sankeshwar, the third-generation scion steering VTPL.
“Recently, when I met Shiva, he mentioned the movie itself,” Srinivas told the assembled gathering of fleet managers, Swedish joint-venture partners, and transport executives, his cadence unhurried. The film in question was Vijayanand, the cinematic biography detailing the life of Shiva’s grandfather, the Padma Shri recipient Dr Vijay Sankeshwar, who had laid the foundation of northern Karnataka’s freight networks starting in 1976. “With a lot of curiosity, I watched the movie, and I found it truly quite inspiring,” Srinivas said. “It is a story of an extraordinary man who started his transportation journey with just one lorry. Is it right? With just one lorry, faced challenges and setbacks, but continued to pursue his dream.”
There was a particular line in the Kannada biopic that Srinivas had turned over in his mind: He made his own road in roaming all over India. “I thought, what a powerful description of an entrepreneur and what a powerful description of the environment they live in,” Srinivas observed, looking out toward the Sankeshwar family seated in the front row.
The Bengaluru ceremony, commemorating an order of 150 coaches, featured bespoke fleet reconfiguration, including factory-built onboard washrooms designed for long inter-state routes like the 1,900-kilometre run between Bengaluru and Jodhpur. This event served as Srinivas’s formal media introduction as VECV’s chief executive. His presence there drew its quiet weight not from the ceremony itself, but from the thirty-two years of shop-floor memory he carried into it.
The Dust of Pithampur, 1994
To trace Srinivas’s ascent is to step back into the landscape of 1994, when he first walked through the gates of Eicher. The Indian economy, three years into the structural reforms that dismantled the industrial License Raj, was still governed by the physical limitations of its road transport. The commercial vehicle trade was essentially a closed duopoly: the Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (Telco) and Ashok Leyland carved up the freight corridors with rugged, semi-forward-control haulage chassis fitted with timber-and-sheet-metal cowl cabins.
Eicher, which had begun in 1948 as the Goodearth Company importing German agricultural tractors, was then a plucky insurgent. Under a technical collaboration with Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors started in the mid-1980s, the company had established a manufacturing plant near Indore. There, it assembled the Eicher-Mitsubishi Canter, a cab-over-engine light commercial vehicle whose lightweight metallurgy and transmission were viewed with deep scepticism by regional highway mechanics accustomed to heavy cast-iron blocks and sledgehammer maintenance.
“I spent thirty-two years in this organization,” Srinivas recounted later that afternoon in an interaction with Autocar Professional, settling into a side room for his first extended interview since his appointment. “I started my career in product development, worked in purchasing, then moved to product strategy, and some part of commercial organization and manufacturing, before finally getting the role to lead the company as its MD & CEO.”
“A lot of things have changed during this period. But however, one thing is common, I always strongly believe, is the values,” he noted in response to a question on his journey with the company. “So, what helped us as an organization to grow and what helped me to understand the business better is the values,” Srinivas added.
The Gothenburg Compact
The transformation of Eicher from a domestic assembler into a global manufacturing node occurred in July 2008. Siddhartha Lal, the Eicher scion who had earlier divested the group’s legacy tractor operations to Tractors and Farm Equipment Limited (TAFE) to concentrate resources on Royal Enfield motorcycles and trucks, negotiated a 54:46 joint venture with AB Volvo of Gothenburg, Sweden. The partnership catalyzed Eicher's transition into a global powertrain hub, culminating in Volvo selecting VECV’s Pithampur plant in 2013 to manufacture its medium-duty Euro VI base engines for global markets.
Joint ventures between foreign automotive multinationals and Indian family-led firms have an almost uniform history of acrimonious dissolution; mismatched product expectations and differing capital horizons had earlier impacted domestic partnerships involving Premier Automobiles Ltd-Peugeot, DCM-Daewoo, and Mahindra's three separate alliances (Ford, Renault and Navistar). However, the VECV alliance endured because of a clear operational division. Volvo contributed global engine architectures, automated transmissions, and manufacturing discipline, while Eicher provided an ultra-frugal supplier ecosystem, national distribution, and an instinctive understanding of the Indian transporter’s cost-per-tonne-kilometre calculations.
Srinivas was positioned squarely at the institutional junction where Gothenburg met Pithampur. Rising through sourcing and product strategy, he served as one of the operational architects who ensured that Swedish quality could be manufactured at Indian cost structures. By 2013, the joint venture had accomplished a feat that surprised the wider industry: Volvo selected VECV’s Pithampur powertrain plant as the exclusive global hub to assemble its medium-duty five- and eight-litre Euro VI base engines, exporting fully built power units back to assembly lines in Europe and East Asia.
“If you see broadly our businesses, we are responsible for Eicher-branded trucks and buses, we are responsible for Volvo-branded trucks and buses, and we have a components and aggregate business,” Srinivas explained, laying out the corporate geometry. “All these businesses are on their own, standalone basis; they perform and they deliver results to VECV. However, at the same time, there are a lot of synergies available within these businesses. Some of the businesses can support manufacturing to each other, and purchasing support can be provided to other businesses. Today we have a plant which can make about 100,000 engines and give it to various brands of Volvo globally. Similarly, we are coming up with a new AMT plant.”
From Eicher Bus Head to VECV MD and CEO
Between 2018 and 2022, Srinivas led the Eicher Bus business, steering the vertical through the economic disruption of the pandemic, when school transit and intercity passenger movement stalled entirely. In 2024, he moved to Pithampur as Chief Operating Officer, running manufacturing, sourcing, and product engineering across all facilities. When long-serving Managing Director Vinod Aggarwal stepped up to the board as Chairman in early 2026 after nearly two decades at the operational helm, Siddhartha Lal bypassed external candidates. Srinivas, who had spent thirty-two years inside the organization, was handed the reins.
The Heavy-Duty Frontier
The company Srinivas inherits occupies a distinct structural position in the Indian commercial vehicle hierarchy. In the light- and medium-duty (LMD) segment, ranging from 5-18 tonnes gross vehicle weight, Eicher has long held market dominance, commanding over 34 percent market share, frequently running neck-and-neck with or leading Tata Motors in the segment.
At the extreme upper crust of the market, Volvo Trucks India holds a virtual monopoly in specialised 50-70 tonne deep-mining tippers and multi-axle pullers.
However, a large core of the Indian truck market—the high-tonnage heavy-duty haulage trucks, multi-axle rigids, and prime movers that ferry cement, steel, and containerized freight between Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai—remains firmly in the grip of Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland. For VECV, breaking this legacy duopoly has been a decade-long siege.
Srinivas does not attempt to disguise the operational challenge. “We have been doing extremely well as far as light and medium duty trucks are concerned,” he said. “And we are doing very well as far as the segment which starts in heavy duty. We are also doing very well in the Pro 8000, which is the mid-premium tipper segment where we have been the market leaders. And in the Volvo trucks and Volvo buses, we are the market leaders.”
The frontier, he conceded, lies in expanding that market share into heavy-haulage multi-axles and long-distance tractor-trailers. “We have to actually give them the same experience what we have been providing in this segment into the haulage and the tractor-trailer segments,” he said. “That continued to be our focus area. From where do we give these solutions? First is the fuel efficiency. Then we will give comfort, whether it is a driver comfort or in terms of the cargo safety. And we work a lot in improving the turnaround time. So, with these three, we are very confident that we can have better opportunities in heavy duty also.”
His reasoning is tied to the physical evolution of Indian roads. For past several decades, Indian freight speeds were throttled by municipal border check-posts, octroi collection gates, and narrow two-lane corridors, with trucks averaging barely 200-250 kilometres a day. With the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), electronic tolling, and increasing access-controlled expressways, daily vehicle utilisation on trunk routes could climb past 500 kilometres.
“Within India, you appreciate there are several opportunities available, but some of the routes, some of the applications are ahead of the curve,” Srinivas said. “You take a typical route like Mumbai–Delhi: there, it is actually closer to any other developed nation. So, we will work in these locations with these very specific customers, with the new applications, and we will prove this concept, and that we will extrapolate to the rest of the country. What is the game changer here? Game changer is the unmatched reliability and the durability of vehicle what we provide to the customer. If you provide that, actually you can prove a concept. Once this concept is proven commercially, it can be extrapolated across the country.”
Capacity Expansion
Beyond heavy haulage, Srinivas is supervising an aggressive diversification downward into the sub-two-tonne small commercial vehicle (SCV) segment—a high-volume category dominated for two decades by the Tata Ace and Mahindra Bolero Maxi Truck. To mount this challenge, VECV constructed an advanced manufacturing facility at Bagroda, near Bhopal, during the pandemic, designing the assembly lines around an untraditional demographic.
“First is we have waited long and developed this product,” Srinivas said. “This product started with all three fuel options to start with: we are there in EV, and we are there in diesel, and we are there in CNG. And we have a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Bhopal and incidentally, which is run by the girls also. So, we are there today, and we have invested on capacity and we have invested on product development. Now our plan is we do not want to rush. We wanted to offer these products in a very selected market and selected segments and give that experience to the customer.”
Connected Trucks and VECV's New Uptime Centre
Parallel to the factory floor is an equally pragmatic push into predictive software. In 2020, VECV became one of the early commercial vehicle makers in India to fit 100 percent of its trucks and buses with standard, factory-fitted telematics linked to a round-the-clock "Uptime Centre" in Pithampur.
“First and foremost, it is not a standard... it is not like a 'me-too' kind of thing,” Srinivas said, leaning forward. “The purpose of telematics is beyond just giving a track and trace to the customer. This telematics also has a ten years roadmap. Just call it connected trucks. Connected trucks also has, like any other product development, a roadmap. Initially we started with some ten features; those features keep on getting added. If these solutions go into the bus, parents have a need that it has to be seamlessly connected, they should get information of the kid. In trucks, the biggest anxiety of the consumer is on the safety of the goods. We inaugurated a new-generation Uptime Centre about a week back. Now, it is enabling your truck to be connected with the Uptime Centre. Hence, your reliability will improve further. And subscription is going up every now and then because it is seamlessly connected with uptime.”
The New Horizon
Srinivas’s appointment coincides with a delicate moment in the domestic transport economy. Commercial vehicle manufacturing in India is notoriously cyclical, subject to macroeconomic headwinds, interest-rate adjustments, and changes in freight volumes. The domestic industry touched an all-time peak in the pre-pandemic fiscal year of 2019, followed by a sharp contraction caused by new axle-load norms (which overnight legalised twenty percent more payload on existing axles, curbing new truck orders), the mandatory transition to BS-VI emissions, and prolonged pandemic lockdowns.
Transporters deferred vehicle replacements for years. Srinivas argues that this delayed replacement cycle has finally broken open.
“First and foremost, GST 2.0, what it has done was it has triggered the demand to start with,” Srinivas observed. “It has solved a lot of issues which were lying there unsolved. To start with, it has actually triggered the cycle of replacement, which has been pending for long. Indian auto industry has reached its peak in the pre-COVID era. Some other reason, the replacement cycle is not getting started. So GST 2.0 triggered fundamental demand. With the demand, the replacement cycle also got added. Consequent to that, the demand has actually started going up and up. It has surpassed the current challenges of the geopolitical situation and fuel inflation. For sure, the Indian commercial vehicle industry will set a new benchmark; it will record a new high.”
VECV Capacity Expansion at Bhopal Plant
To absorb that anticipated volume, VECV is expanding its manufacturing footprint. “We have now two plants, one in Bhopal and one in Pithampur, and we have two bus plants, one in Baggad (near Pithampur in Madhya Pradesh) and one in Hoskote [Karnataka]. Well in advance, we are adding further capacities in our Bhopal plant. Our capacities will go up by at least another 15 to 20% more.”
Back in the Bengaluru ballroom, as the formal event drew to a close, Srinivas' speech from the morning still hung over the room; specifically, the traditional Sanskrit benediction he had offered to the transport family that had started with a single lorry half a century ago. “Roads are built with perseverance,” Srinivas had told them. “Destinations are made with determination. Those who walk with determination, their stories will last for centuries. I want to say one thing: Satamanam bhav (Satamanam bhavati is a traditional Vedic blessing wishing 100 years of healthy life), not hundreds of years. You should run thousands of years. Make customers happy, and it should give more business to Volvo. Both of us should survive and sustain,” he added playfully before signing off.