Jamshedji Tata

THE FATHER of the Tata empire, J. N. Tata was in no small measure the chief architect of modern industrial India. A committed philanthropist and industrialist rolled into one, Tata was born at Navsari, Gujrat in 1839. Mrs. Indira Gandhi once paid him a fitting tribute by calling him the man who launched India on the road to industrialization by setting up basic industrial infrastructure.
The restless industrialist came later. The young Jamshedji studied at Elphinstone College, Bombay. Students of this college warmly remember this great man of India as one of their fold. He sought employment and quickly joined a firm that traded with China in opium and yarn; it was here that he tasted blood and the entrepreneur in him began to stir. Eager to learn business, he sailed to Hong Kong for training in trade.
Next, Tata became a relentless globe-trotter and returned to Bombay as a well-heeled young man in 1863 and started a cotton trade. He caught the boat to Liverpool to look after cotton shipments from India. But that was a brief interlude, cut short by the fall in cotton prices. When prices plummeted even further, he closed his office in Liverpool and return to Bombay where he would not only start a new life but would open a new chapter in the industrial history of India. In the interim period he booked supply orders for British troops and earned handsome profits. The budding entrepreneur had mastered the art and the science of business.
Manchester was a turning point in Tata’s – and India’s – life. He went there to study the working of textile mills and returned to start a mill in India. Quick off the mark, he purchased a string of textile mills, becoming the fastest rising industrialist in India.
But the pursuit of lucre was never an end in itself. For Tata was, at heart, a philanthropist. He started an educational endowment fund in keeping with his magnanimity. His legacies to the nation include projects that bear the stamp of history: the Tata Iron And Steel Company, the Tata Hydro Electirc Power Supply and the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore. He died in Bad Nauheim, Germany in 1904.