FUTURE LEADERS: BORN INTO IT, BUILT FOR MORE – Avishkar Srivastava

Avishkar Srivastava is Chief Innovation Officer at The PDP Group — an AEO and ISO-certified conglomerate spanning freight forwarding, ICD operations, and transportation. A graduate of the University of Auckland in Marketing and Innovation & Entrepreneurship, he returned to the family business in 2014 not to maintain it, but to transform it. In 2022, he became the first Indian to win the FIATA Young Logistics Professional Award for the Asia Pacific region.

“Strong interdepartmental coordination and real-time data analysis can only be achieved if organisations keep employees motivated.”

Avishkar Srivastava was, by his own admission, born into logistics. “I was born into a family that was highly passionate about logistics,” he says simply, as though that explains everything. In a way, it does. But what he has done with that inheritance is anything but simple.

Returning to The PDP Group in 2014 after graduating from the University of Auckland, he came back not to maintain the family enterprise but to rethink it. The group — operating across freight forwarding, ICD operations, and transportation — was already well-established. What it needed, in his view, was a different kind of investment: in people first, technology second. He brought in industrial psychologists to bridge the gap between employer and employee. He built cloud-based digital profiles for drivers. He insisted, from the outset, that real-time data is only as valuable as the motivated workforce behind it. “Strong interdepartmental coordination and real-time data analysis,” he says, “can only be achieved if organisations keep employees motivated.” In an industry that often treats labour as a variable cost, that is a deliberately distinct stance, and one that has shaped the entire direction of PDP’s transformation.

It was on the global stage that his thinking commanded wider attention. In 2022, he became the first Indian to win the FIATA Young Logistics Professional Award for the Asia Pacific region — recognised for a dissertation on decarbonising trade lanes through sustainable logistics. The subject, he argues, is not a niche concern but an existential one for the sector. “We consider sustainability to be an essential aspect,” he says, “and we are more willing to explore new means of transportation that minimise carbon emissions.” For Avishkar, the transition to greener logistics is not a regulatory obligation. It is the direction the industry must move in whether it chooses to or not — and the sooner companies get ahead of it, the better positioned they will be.

At The PDP Group, the transformation he has driven is measured and deliberate. Technology has been adopted not as a showcase but as a genuine operational lever — integrated into daily workflows and anchored by the human systems that make those workflows function. The result is a company that looks recognisably like the one his family built, but operates at a fundamentally different level of sophistication. The infrastructure is digital; the culture remains deeply human. Both, he argues, are necessary — and neither is sufficient without the other.

His advice for peers navigating change within legacy organisations carries the credibility of someone who has done it from the inside: “Young people must first gain the trust of seniors before implementing large-scale changes.” It is counsel shaped by experience rather than theory. Rushing ahead of institutional trust, he has learnt, creates resistance that slows everything else down. Moving with it, by contrast, accelerates more than any single technology investment could. In logistics, as he puts it, trust moves cargo. He is betting it can move entire industries, too — and he has the awards, the transformation, and the growing team at PDP to begin making that case.