Srivastava was born on 8 July 1920 in a religious Chitraguptvanshi Kayastha family and was educated in Lucknow, India (BA, MA, LLB).
He started his career as a civil servant in India, entering the Indian Administrative Service on 15 October 1949.
[2] He served as a Joint Secretary in the Indian Prime Minister's office from 1964 to 1966, during the premiership of Lal Bahadur Shastri.
Srivastava became the first chief executive of the Shipping Corporation of India and in 1974 was elected to serve as the Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a United Nations agency based in London, serving successive four-year terms as Secretary-General from 1974 to 1989.
Srivastava has stated that: "his life has been greatly influenced by his wife and he has been motivated by her vision of one Almighty God and one human family".