The 'humble' Indian tycoon who died aged 86

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

The tycoon led the Tata Group – known as a “salt-to-software” conglomerate of more than 100 companies that employed around 660,000 people – for more than two decades. Annual sales are over $100 billion (£76.5 billion).

Founded by Jamsetji Tata, a pioneer of Indian business, the 155-year-old Tata Group includes a business empire ranging from Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel to aviation and salt pans.

According to Peter Casey, author of “The Story of Tata,” an authorized book about the group, the company's ethos “combines capitalism with philanthropy by conducting business in a way that improves the lives of others.”

Tata Sons, the group's holding company, has a “number of companies, including privately held and listed companies, but essentially all of them are owned by a philanthropic foundation,” he explains.

Ratan Tata was born in 1937 into a traditional Parsi family – a highly educated and wealthy community whose ancestors trace their 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 had some harrowing experiences: once he lost an engine while flying a helicopter in college, and twice he lost the single engine on his plane. “So I had to slide in,” he told an interviewer. Later he often flew his company's business jet.

He returned to India in 1962 when his grandmother, Lady Navajbai, fell ill and called for him. It was then that JRD Tata – a relative from another branch of the family – asked him to join the Tata Group. “He (JRD Tata) was my greatest mentor… He was like a father and a brother to me – and not enough has been said about that,” Tata told an interviewer.

Ratan Tata was sent to the company's steel plant in Jamshedpur in eastern India, where he spent a few years in the factory before becoming technical assistant to the manager. In the early 1970s he took over two struggling corporate companies, one of which manufactured radios and televisions and the other of which manufactured textiles. He managed to change the first step and had mixed results with the textile company.

In 1991, JRD Tata, who had led the group for over half a century, appointed Ratan Tata as his successor over senior company candidates for the position. “If you found the publications of that time, the criticism was personal – JRD was accused of nepotism and I was labeled as the wrong choice,” Ratan Tata later said.

Peter Casey writes that under Ratan Tata's leadership, “a large but rather stodgy Indian manufacturer began to evolve into a global brand with a large focus on consumer products.”

But the journey was mixed.

During his tenure, the group made many bold acquisitions, among other things the takeover of the Anglo-Dutch steel manufacturer Corus And The UK-based car brands Jaguar and Land Rover. Some of these decisions have paid off, while others – including a failed telecommunications company – have cost the company a lot of money.

A high point came in 2000 when Tata bought Tetley and became the second largest tea company in the world. The deal was the largest acquisition of an international brand by an Indian company.

A few years later, a guest journalist from a British newspaper asked Tata if he liked the irony of an Indian company buying a leading British brand. “Tata is too clever and too shy to be caught gloating over his successes like a territorial-grabbing East India Company nabob,” the journalist later wrote.

Tata's attempt to build a safe and affordable car turned out to be a disappointment. It was launched to much fanfare in 2009 as a compact model, with the base model costing just 100,000 rupees ($1,222; £982). But after the initial success and euphoria, the brand lost its importance compared to other manufacturers due to production and marketing problems.

Tata later said it was a “huge mistake to brand Nano as the cheapest car in the world. People don’t want to be seen driving the cheapest car in the world!”

His resilience was also put to the test Terror attacks in Mumbai dated November 26, 2008. Tata's marquee Taj Mahal Palace was one of two luxury hotels attacked, along with a train station, a hospital, a Jewish cultural center and several other targets in Mumbai.

33 of the 166 people who died in the 60-hour siege were inside the Taj. These included 11 hotel employees, a third of all the hotel's victims. Tata committed to caring for the families of killed or injured employees and paid the relatives of those killed the wages they would have earned for the rest of their lives. He also spent more than $1 billion to restore the damaged hotel 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 for a few months after the previous incumbent, Cyrus Mistry was oustedwhich sparked a bitter management feud (Mistry died in a car accident in September 2022). The role was eventually given to Natarajan Chandrasekaran, who was formerly managing director 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 man”. He found a “wonderful calm” about him and a “fierce discipline,” which included creating a handwritten to-do list every day. He also described himself as “a bit of an optimist.”

Tata was also a humble and thoughtful businessman. In 1989, after police were called to break up a strike that paralyzed operations at one of his company's factories in Pune, Tata told reporters: “Perhaps we have taken our workers for granted. We assumed we were doing everything we could for them, even though we probably weren't.”

In 2009, Tata spoke at a school alumni event about his dream for his country “where every Indian has an equal opportunity to shine through his merits.”

“In a country like ours,” he said, “you have to try to lead by example and not flaunt your wealth and importance.”