The ‘humble’ Indian tycoon dies at 86

Ratan Tata, one of India’s most internationally recognized business leaders, has died aged 86.

The tycoon has led the Tata Group for more than two decades, known as the “salt to software” conglomerate that owns more than 100 companies and employs about 660,000 people. Its annual revenue exceeds $100bn (£76.5bn).

The 155-year-old Tata Group was founded by Indian business pioneer Jamsetji Tata and spans business empires such as Jaguar Land Rover, Tata Steel, aviation and salt pans.

Peter Casey, author of the group’s licensed book “The Tata Story,” said the company’s ethos is to “combine capitalism and philanthropy by doing business in a way that makes other people’s lives better.”

He explained that the group’s holding company, Tata Sons, owns “a number of companies, both private and public, but they are essentially owned by charitable trusts”.

Ratan Tata was born in 1937 into a traditional family in Parsis, a highly educated and prosperous community that traces its ancestry to Zoroastrian refugees in India. His parents separated in the 1940s.

Tata attended college in the United States, earning a degree in architecture from Cornell University. During his seven-year stay, he learned to drive and fly. He’s had some traumatic experiences: He once lost an engine while flying a helicopter in college and twice lost a single engine on an airplane. “So I had to slide in,” he told the interviewer. Later, he often flew the company’s corporate jets.

He returned to India in 1962 when his grandmother, Mrs. Navajbhai, fell ill and needed a visit from him. That’s when JRD Tata – a relative from a different family – invited him to join the Tata Group. “he [JRD Tata] was my best mentor… He was like a father and a brother to me – not enough is said about that,” Tata told an interviewer.

Ratan Tata was posted to a company’s steel plant in Jamshedpur, eastern India, where he worked on the factory floor for several years before becoming the manager’s technical assistant. In the early 1970s, he took over two ailing conglomerates, one producing radios and televisions, the other textiles. He managed to turn the first around, with mixed results with the textile company.

In 1991, JRD Tata, who had led the group for more than half a century, named Ratan Tata as his successor as the company’s top candidate. Ratan Tata later said: “If you find the publications of the time, you will find that the criticisms were personal – JRD suffered from nepotism and I was seen as a bad choice.”

Under Ratan Tata, “a great but rather staid Indian manufacturer began to emerge as a global brand with a strong focus on consumer goods,” writes Peter Casey.

But the journey is complicated.

During his tenure, the group made a number of bold acquisitions, including Acquisition of Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus and British car brands Jaguar and Land Rover. Some of those decisions paid off, while others – including failed telecom ventures – cost the company a lot of money.

It reached its peak in 2000, when Tata acquired Tetley, becoming the world’s second largest tea company. The deal is the largest acquisition of an international brand by an Indian company.

A few years later, a visiting reporter from a British newspaper asked Tata if he liked the irony of an Indian company acquiring a leading British brand. The reporter later wrote: “Tata was too shrewd and too shy to be complacent about his success like some of the turf-grabbing East India Company bosses.”

Tata’s attempts to produce safe, affordable cars have been disappointing. It was launched to much fanfare in compact form in 2009, with the base model priced at just 100,000 rupees ($1,222; £982). But after the initial success and euphoria, the brand began to lose ground to other manufacturers due to production and marketing problems.

Tata later said, “Making the Nano the world’s cheapest car was a huge mistake. People don’t want to be seen driving the world’s cheapest car!”

His adaptability was also tested Mumbai terrorist attack November 26, 2008.

During the 60-hour siege, 166 people died, 33 of them at the Taj Mahal Hotel. These included 11 hotel employees, accounting for one-third of the hotel’s total casualties. Tata is committed to taking care of the families of its employees who were killed or injured and paying them the wages they deserve for the rest of their lives. He also spent more than $1 billion to repair damaged hotels in 21 months.

Towards the end of his career, Tata found himself embroiled in an unpleasant controversy. In October 2016, he returned to Tata Sons as interim chairman, a few months after serving as chairman. Cyrus Mistry evictedtriggering a fierce management dispute (Mistry died in a car accident in September 2022). The position eventually went to Natarajan Chandrasekaran, who had served as chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, India’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $67 billion.

Peter Casey described Tata as a “modest, reserved and even shy person”. He found himself with a “majestic calm” and a “strict discipline” that included preparing a handwritten to-do list each day. He also described himself as a “somewhat optimistic person.”

Tata is also a humble and thoughtful businessman. In 1989, after a strike paralyzed operations at a Tata factory in Pune, after police were called to end the strike, Tata told reporters: “Maybe we take our workers for granted. We thought We are doing everything we can for them.

In 2009, Tata talked about his dream for his motherland at a school alumni event, “Every Indian has an equal opportunity to shine.”

“In a country like ours,” he said, “you have to try to lead by example rather than show off your wealth and prestige.”