विमर्श Vimarsh · Udyamnīti

If There Had Been No Ratan Tata

He took a ₹10,627 crore group in 1991 and left a $100 billion one in 2012. The decisions, the numbers, the trivia, the mistakes and the man, with the sources attached. And then the question nobody asked at the funeral: what would be different if he had stayed in Los Angeles.

Nikhil Sharma · उद्यमनीति Udyamnīti · 9 October 2026 · 16 min read

Two years ago tonight a man of eighty-six died at Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai and the next morning a stray dog called Goa walked into the NCPA and sat beside the body. Everything else about Ratan Tata has been said. This is an attempt to say only what can be checked, and then to ask the one question the obituaries did not.

The facts first, because the man spent the last years of his life correcting them. In May 2020 he put a note on Twitter about a quotation going round with his face on it: I am afraid this too has not been said by me. My picture alongside a quote does not guarantee me having said it. The most famous Ratan Tata line of all, I do not believe in taking right decisions, I take decisions and then make them right, he disowned on a stage at HEC Paris in 2015. He never said it. He did say, in January 2008 when the input costs of the Nano had run away from him, a promise is a promise. That one is his, and it is the better line.

The boy who meant to stay in Los Angeles

Born 28 December 1937. Parents separated when he was ten; raised and formally adopted by his grandmother Navajbai, the widow of Sir Ratan Tata. Riverdale in New York, then Cornell, where he entered with the class of 1959 to read mechanical engineering, switched to architecture and took the B.Arch. in 1962. He worked for an architecture firm in Los Angeles and meant to stay. His grandmother fell ill and asked him back. My grandmother talked me into returning, he told Simi Garewal in 1997. Or rather I returned because she wanted me back.

He joined in 1962 and was sent to Jamshedpur to shovel limestone and tend the blast furnace for two years. In 1971 he was handed NELCO, a radio company, took its market share from two per cent to twenty-five and lost it all to a recession and a strike, a failure he said had forever been held against him. In 1977 he was given Empress Mills in Nagpur, cleared its losses, paid dividends for a few years, and watched a textile recession take it into liquidation; the state acquired the undertaking by Act in 1986. Two assignments, two failures. In 1981 J. R. D. Tata made him chairman of Tata Industries and told no one whether that meant anything. It took ten more years.

What he found in 1991

On 25 March 1991 he became chairman of Tata Sons. The group was described that year as a ₹10,627 crore company. Roughly ten per cent of its revenue came from outside India. Tata Sons held about two per cent of Tata Steel. The companies were run as fiefs by men who had been in them for decades: Russi Mody at Steel, Darbari Seth at Chemicals and Tea, Ajit Kerkar at the hotels, Nani Palkhivala at ACC. Mody had been J. R. D.’s likely successor for most of the eighties and called the heirs clowns. Palkhivala had been a contender until his politics made him a liability. Four months after Ratan Tata took the chair, P. V. Narasimha Rao’s government abolished the licence raj. The group that had grown up inside the licence system was handed to the least-tested man in it in the year the system ended.

The decisions, in order

The satraps, 1992–97. A retirement age for directors, seventy-five at first and lowered later; he told Vir Sanghvi he left the room when Tata Steel asked for seventy. Mody promoted his adopted son without the board and was gone in April 1993 after fifty-three years, the most painful break of his professional life. Seth left Chemicals and Tea at seventy-five and Tata took both chairs. Kerkar’s era at the hotels ended on 30 August 1997 after the group itself sent foreign-exchange allegations to the Reserve Bank. Nobody had removed a Tata satrap before. He removed four.

The stake and the brand, 1996. Tata Sons raised its holdings in the key companies to twenty-six per cent and more, enough to block a hostile bid in a country that had just learned the phrase. Then it asked each company to pay for the name: a quarter of a per cent of revenue or five per cent of profit before tax, whichever was lower, and Palkhivala refused at ACC on the ground that ACC was only closely associated with the group. The brand fee was recast as a voluntary subscription into a trust. The brand was valued at three hundred million dollars in 1998 and eleven billion by 2012. TCS alone paid ₹200 crore for it in the year to March 2024.

The exits. Tata Oil Mills to Hindustan Lever in 1993 after two loss-making years; Lakmé, his stepmother Simone’s company, to the same buyer by 1996 for about ₹230 crore; the ACC stake to Gujarat Ambuja at ₹370 a share, about three times the market, between December 1999 and June 2000. A chairman who has just fought four barons for control sells three businesses because they are not the business. The group that had a hundred-odd companies when he left had sold off, by one count, two hundred and fifty.

The car, 1998. The Indica at the Delhi Auto Expo, India’s first indigenously engineered passenger car, ₹2.6 lakh, a hundred thousand bookings, and Maruti cut the price of the 800 by thirty thousand rupees in reply. The early cars had quality problems and the year to March 2000 showed a loss of ₹500 crore. He offered to resign. The board refused. The relaunched V2 sold a hundred and forty thousand a year.

Tetley, February 2000. £271 million, reported as $432 million, for a British tea brand older than the group. The first large overseas acquisition by an Indian company and the one that taught the others it could be done.

TCS, August 2004. The IPO at ₹850 a share raised ₹5,420 crore, the largest in India to that date, and valued the company at about $8.8 billion. In February 2024 TCS crossed ₹15 lakh crore in market value. The company existed since 1968. The decision to list it, and to keep the cash inside the group rather than sell it, was his.

Corus, 31 January 2007. A seven-and-a-half-hour auction run by the UK Takeover Panel against CSN of Brazil, from an opening 455 pence to a closing 608, £6.7 billion, around twelve billion dollars, almost all of it borrowed. Tata Steel became the fifth largest steelmaker in the world and the largest foreign takeover by an Indian company in history. By April 2016 Business Today was adding up the damage at about ₹38,500 crore, counting impairments, accumulated British losses and capital put in; the long-products business was sold for one pound; the UK unit was losing a million dollars a day; in 2024 both blast furnaces at Port Talbot closed and two and a half thousand jobs went with them. Open magazine called it an aspirational mistake. It is the honest word.

Jaguar Land Rover, June 2008. $2.3 billion in cash to Ford for two brands Ford had given up on. The story everyone tells is the one from 1999: Tata flew to Detroit to sell Ford his loss-making car business and was told, by the account of a man in the room, that he did not know anything and should not have started a car division at all. Nine years later Bill Ford said, by the same account, that Tata was doing them a favour by buying. The account is Pravin Kadle’s, given in 2015; there is no transcript and this essay does not pretend there is. What there is: JLR made a record £2.6 billion profit in 2015, lost £3.6 billion in 2019, and in the year to March 2024 earned £2.2 billion on record revenue of £29 billion. Corus and JLR were the same bet made in the same eighteen months. One paid.

The Nano, 10 January 2008. A one-lakh car, which he said that day the press had speculated and he had accepted as a challenge. Singur was abandoned on 3 October 2008 and the plant moved to Sanand. Commercial launch in March 2009. Peak sales of 74,527 in the year to March 2012 against a plan of a quarter of a million. One car was built in June 2018. Cyrus Mistry’s letter of October 2016 said there was no line of sight to profitability and that emotional reasons alone had kept the group from the decision. He was right about the numbers. The engineering was real and the positioning killed it: nobody wants to be seen in the cheapest car in the world, and the price rose anyway. Tata said in 2012 the company had wasted an early opportunity and had not been ready with a dealer network. A documented failure, owned.

The Taj, 26 November 2008. Thirty-one people died in the hotel, eleven of them staff who stayed to get twelve to fifteen hundred guests out. The chairman stood outside the building for three days. Within a fortnight he and R. K. Krishna Kumar had set up the Taj Public Service Welfare Trust: the families of the dead were paid the last salary for life, the children were educated anywhere in the world, medical cover for life, a counsellor, loans forgiven. Harvard Business School wrote it up as a case in 2011 and the Harvard Business Review called the staff the ordinary heroes of the Taj. We can be hurt, he is reported to have said, but we cannot be knocked down.

Mistry, 24 October 2016. Four years after handing over to Cyrus Mistry, forty-four years old and the son of the largest single shareholder, the board removed him without a stated reason and made Tata interim chairman. Mistry’s letter the next day warned of ₹1,18,000 crore of write-downs across five legacy hotspots, most of them Tata’s own decisions. The tribunal dismissed Mistry’s plea in 2018, the appellate tribunal reinstated him in December 2019, and the Supreme Court set that aside on 26 March 2021. In between, in January 2017, the selection committee chose N. Chandrasekaran, a TCS lifer from 1987 and the first chairman of Tata Sons who was not a Parsi. Mistry died in a car crash in September 2022. The governance questions he raised did not die with him and this essay does not pretend the episode was clean.

Air India, 27 January 2022. The airline J. R. D. founded in 1932 and the state took in 1953 came back to the group for an enterprise value of ₹18,000 crore, most of it debt. He was eighty-four and no longer in the chair. His statement the day the bid was won opened with the words great news and closed with Welcome back, Air India. The airline lost ₹11,216 crore in its first full year back and more the next, and has since ordered four hundred and seventy aircraft. Whether the welcome was a decision or a sentiment is a question for 2032.

The numbers

Revenue ₹10,627 crore in 1991 and ₹4.75 lakh crore in the year he left, forty-six times. Net profit fifty-one times. Market capitalisation thirty-three times. Revenue from outside India ten per cent at the start and sixty-seven at the end. A hundred countries. By the year to March 2024 the group reported revenue above $165 billion, thirty companies in ten verticals, twenty-six of them listed, more than a million employees, and in February 2024 it became the first Indian group with a combined market value above ₹30 lakh crore. Sixty-six per cent of Tata Sons belongs to philanthropic trusts, a structure that predates him by a century; the trusts disbursed ₹456 crore in the year to March 2023 and ₹902 crore two years later. A 2021 Hurun study put the Tata family’s philanthropy over the century at $102 billion, the largest of anyone in the world.

Set against those: the ₹38,500 crore Corus tally, the Nano, the $1.17 billion the group paid NTT Docomo in 2017 to settle an arbitration over Tata Teleservices, and the Air India losses since 2022. A fair ledger has both columns and the first column is longer.

The trivia, verified

He held a pilot’s licence and on 8 February 2007, at sixty-nine, flew an F-16 with a Lockheed test pilot at Aero India in Bangalore. He joined Instagram on 31 October 2019 with the words after a long absence from public life I look forward to exchanging stories and had 341,000 followers within hours. In February 2018 he skipped a Buckingham Palace ceremony because one of his two dogs was dying. When Bombay House was renovated for the first time since 1924 his first question was where the reception strays would go; the building reopened in 2018 with a climate-controlled kennel he inspected before anything else. Tata Trusts gave Cornell $50 million in 2008, its largest gift from outside the United States at the time, and Harvard $50 million in 2010 for Tata Hall. After leaving the chair he put small cheques into Ola, Paytm, Snapdeal, Urban Company, Lenskart and a dozen more; the ₹10 lakh in Lenskart came back four and a half times, the ₹66 lakh in FirstCry came back ₹5 crore in the IPO. In 2022 he seeded Goodfellows, a companionship service for the elderly founded by Shantanu Naidu, the Pune engineer who had written to him in 2014 about reflective collars for street dogs, and said at the launch: you do not know what it is like to be lonely until you spend time alone wishing for companionship. On 1 July 2024, three months before he died, the Trusts opened a ₹165 crore small-animal hospital in Mahalaxmi with two hundred beds. His will left ₹12 lakh in trust for his pets, paying ₹30,000 a quarter.

The man

He never married and said in 2011 he had come close four times. In 1997 he told Garewal that there are many times I feel lonely at not having a wife or a family and that the job makes you a little lonely. Asked whether he was remote he said I think it is true, I think I suffer from that. He was the shy man in the most public chair in Indian business for twenty-one years and he ran it by a method rather than by charisma: fix the age, fix the stake, fix the fee, sell what is not the business, buy abroad, build the one car, pay the families, pick the successor, correct the quotes. When the method failed, at Corus, at the Nano, with Mistry, it failed in public and he said so in public, which is rarer in Indian business than the successes.

He ran the most public chair in Indian business for twenty-one years by a method rather than by charisma, and when the method failed it failed in public and he said so.

If there had been no Ratan Tata

Now the question. Suppose the grandmother had not fallen ill in 1962, or had not asked, and the architect had stayed in Los Angeles. What is different?

The chair in 1991 goes to Russi Mody or to a compromise. The satraps stay. Each company remains a fief with Tata Sons holding two per cent of the best of them, in the first year that a hostile takeover of an Indian blue chip became legally possible. The likeliest history of the Tata group after 1991 is the history of most other licence-era houses: a slow partition, a few jewels sold to foreigners in the late nineties, a name on a dozen unrelated companies and a trust that collects dividends from fewer of them each year. There is no brand fee because there is no brand to speak of, only a surname.

TCS still exists and still grows, because the offshore model was Kohli’s and the market was America’s. But it is listed earlier by a cash-hungry board, or sold, and the proceeds leave. There is no Tetley in 2000, so the idea that an Indian company can buy a British one waits for someone else and arrives later. There is no Corus, which saves the group ₹38,500 crore and the Welsh steel towns nothing, since someone else would have bought and closed them. There is no JLR, which means Ford sells it to a private-equity buyer in 2008 and the brands are either dead or Chinese by 2015, and India has no car company anyone outside India has heard of. There is no Nano, and no Singur, and Sanand is a village.

The Taj is still attacked on 26 November 2008. The families of the eleven are paid what the law requires. There is no trust, no case study, no sentence about being hurt but not knocked down, because the man who said it is designing houses in California. Air India stays with the state and is wound down or sold to a foreign airline, and J. R. D.’s photograph is not posted to anyone’s feed in October 2021.

And Indian business lacks its one example of a man who inherited the largest private institution in the country and treated it as a method to be run and corrected rather than a possession to be enjoyed. That is the real subtraction. Not the revenue, which other groups also multiplied in the liberalised decades. The posture. Every Indian founder who has since sold a company abroad, paid a family beyond the law, admitted a failure on a stage or asked the press to stop quoting him has had a template, and the template was not there in 1990.

He would have hated the counterfactual. He would have said the trusts were there before him and would be there after, that Kohli built TCS and Chandrasekaran built the rest, that Goa chose Bombay House and not him. All of that is true. It is also true that the parts of a thing do not inspect themselves. Somebody has to name them, write what each must do, and check. For twenty-one years and then four more that was his job, and it is the whole of what the counterfactual removes.

The wager

Dated 9 October 2026. By 9 October 2031 Air India will either be profitable for two consecutive years under Tata ownership or will have been merged, recapitalised with outside equity or sold down, and the Corus-era steel assets in Britain will be an electric-arc plant at Port Talbot with fewer than five thousand people and no blast furnace. If the first happens the welcome of 2022 was a decision. If only the second happens it was a sentiment, and I will say so here.

Gurugram, 9 October 2026, the second anniversary of his death. A long essay on the Udyamnīti shelf, written because the request was for the man, the decisions, the numbers and the question, and because the man spent his last years asking people to check what they said about him.

Sources. Life: Cornell Chronicle obituary; tata.com profile; the 1997 Simi Garewal interview transcript; Peter Casey, The Story of Tata, on the return and the early assignments; Business Standard, forty years on; the Empress Mills Acquisition Act 1986; Times of India 2011 on marriage. Succession and the satraps: Vir Sanghvi’s interview; Open, the reformer; Outlook on the brand royalties and on the titans; the Kerkar case; Business Today on the retirement policy and on the TCS brand fee. Deals: Reuters via Arab News on the TCS IPO; NBC on Tetley and Corus; Business Today, what went wrong at Tata Steel UK; The Chemical Engineer on Port Talbot 2024; Kadle’s account of Ford via PTI; JLR results FY24; JLR FY19 loss; Autocar Professional on the Indica; The Tribune, 11 January 2008, on the Nano promise; Business Today on Nano production; Ratan Tata on the Nano’s mistakes, 2012. The Taj: tata.com, rising phoenix; HBS, Terror at the Taj; The Week on the families. Mistry: CNBC on the letter; ETV Bharat chronology; tata.com on Chandrasekaran. Air India: The News Minute on the handover; the 8 October 2021 statement; FY23 losses. Numbers: IBS case on 1991; Tata group profile FY24; Business Today on the ₹30 lakh crore; Tata Trusts history; Business Today on the philanthropy; disbursals FY25; the Docomo settlement. Trivia: f-16.net on Aero India 2007; The Quint on the decision quote; Boom on the 2020 tweet; Business Today on Instagram; Scroll, from Harish Bhat’s Doing the Right Thing, on the dogs and the kennel; Inc42 on the startup portfolio; Business Today on Goodfellows; The Better India on the animal hospital; Business Today on the will; Gulf News on Goa at the NCPA; Harvard Gazette on Tata Hall.