J.R.D. TATA
Friday, 17th August, 2007
The life of JRD (1904-93) spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century. He was born in Paris and he died in Geneva. In between, he spent over seventy years of his working life in India.
During that period, he brought to India the gift of civil aviation in 1932 and later, in 1948, helped the country spread her wings abroad by launching Air-India International. Thirty years later, when he was removed as Chairman of Air-India, the Daily Telegraph of London, among others, credited him with making Air India one of the world’s most successful airlines. Had he achieved nothing else his place in India’s hall of fame would still have been securer, but he did far more.
For fifty-two years he was Chairman of the largest industrial group in IndiaTata-which produced everything from steel and electric power to chemicals and automobiles. Apart from Air-India (which was nationalized), Tata Chemicals and TELCO, both started under his Chairmanship, became two of India’s top ten companies in both sales and assets.
On the social scene, he was the first national voice to call for family planning. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru agreed with him and said that the country’s strength was its people. Undeterred, for forty years he pursued a campaign to promote family planning, especially through the agency he founded-the Family Planning Association of India.
Belated recognition came to him for this effort: the last of the many international awards he received was the UN Population Award. Two national institutions-the Tata Institute Of Fundamental Research and the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA)-were started because of his support and vision. A third, the National Institute of Advanced Studies, was inaugurated by him two years before he died.
For thirty years, JRD raised his voice against the misguided policies of a controlled economy that stunted the country’s industrial growth and destroyed his own dreams for India’s industrial future.
His joy lay not only in what he personally achieved, but also in the achievement of the other individuals whom he had groomed and who worked for him. When he stepped down after fifty-two years as Chairman of Tata Sons, the press noted that he was the only eminent industrialist in the country who had nurtured, within his own organization, people who had grown into corporate giants in their own right.
JRD’s joy of achievement extended beyond the ambit of business to the institutions he helped create. Significant among them was the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), where he stood beside Dr Homi Bhabha as Bhabha shaped the cradle of India’s atomic energy programme.
JRD was also the first leading industrialist to recognize the responsibilities of business towards rural uplift.
To put JRD’s ideas into action, the Articles of Association of leading Tata Companies were amended and social obligations beyond the welfare of their own employees were accepted as part of the objectives of the companies in question.
Clearly JRD was interested in other people rather than in his own self. For those he didn’t know, he had a smile.
His mother tongue was French; he loved the language and was good at it.
When he settled in India in his early twenties, he decided that he would master the English language, and this he did. And he never relaxed in this endeavour. Until the very end, he took endless trouble to select the exact words he needed to express his thoughts. When he took to flying, he read almost all the books he could get hold of on aviation in the 1920s. When he began to play golf, he read books on golf.
He recalls that at Independence, when he was forty-three, he was much enthused. ‘I had tremendous dreams and expectations of cooperation between the private sector and the Government.’ But his dreams did not come true, except with Air-India International in 1948.
J.R.D. Tata was a product of two continents. His father, R.D. (Ratanji Dadabhoy) Tata, was a cousin and colleague of Jamsetji Tata, the man who brought the industrial revolution to India, giving it steel, hydroelectric power and high-level technological education. His mother, who he was devoted to, was French.
Born in Paris in 1904, JRD schooled in Paris, Bombay and Yokohama. Till the end of his life the fact that he was not sent to Cambridge (where a seat was reserved for him) and recalled by his father to India rattled JRD. He said it gave him ‘an inferiority complex’.
The father must have had a premonition for he died nine months later and JRD stepped in as Director of Tata Sons at the age of twenty-two.
JRD was to have a few other adventures. In the early 1930s, Tata Airlines was launched as a division of Tata Sons.
JRD sought satisfaction in many other ways. All his life he was keen on physical fitness and he took the trouble to exercise until 1987. He played tennis and especially golf till his mid-seventies.
Among other concerns, he felt deeply about the condition of women in India and a couple of years before he died he established a Trust of his own called the J.R.D. and Thelma J. Tata Trust to ameliorate the condition of women, Rewards, decorations and other forms of recognition were not something he craved for, yet his work in every field he involved himself in was so exemplary that the honours poured in.
He was the recipient of the Daniel Guggenheim Award and some of the highest awards in aviation. The Bharat Ratna, his country’s highest civilian decoration, was bestowed upon him in 1992.
When the BBC announced his death in Geneva on 29 November 1993, it called JRD ‘the legendary Indian industrialist’, Yet, for all his worldly power and glory, to those who knew him he was a warm-hearted, caring human being, ‘I want to be remembered,’ he had said, ‘as an honest man who did his duty.’
