One man's four dreams shaped India's largest conglomerate, the Tata Group
Jamsetji Tata set himself four goals: a steel company, a landmark hotel, a world-class institute and hydroelectric power. He lived to see only the hotel, Mumbai's Taj Mahal, the first in British India with electricity. His successors delivered the rest within a few years of his 1904 death.
The family's fortunes turned in 1868, after a cotton-boom venture had gone sour, when they won a share of the contract to supply Napier's British expedition to Abyssinia. Two years later Jamsetji started a trading firm with ₹21,000, then converted a bankrupt oil mill into a cotton mill and sold it at a profit. His son Dorabji founded the Tata Iron and Steel Company, now Tata Steel, in 1907, built western India's first hydro plant, and saw the Indian Institute of Science admit its first students in 1911.
Under JRD Tata, chairman from 1938 to 1988, the group grew from 14 enterprises to 95 and its assets from about US$101 million to more than US$5 billion. JRD also founded an airline in 1932 that became Air India, which the government nationalised in 1953. Tata Motors began in 1945 making locomotives before moving into trucks with Daimler-Benz, and Tata Consultancy Services followed in 1968.
Ratan Tata took over in 1991, the year India opened its economy, and went shopping abroad. Tetley tea came first in 2000, followed by the steelmaker Corus and then, in 2008, Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford, the same year Tata Motors launched the Nano as the world's most affordable car. Under Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman since 2017, the group came full circle by winning back Air India.
Today Tata Sons is the holding company for more than 20 listed affiliates, worth a combined US$320 billion as of October 2025. The group has funded many Indian research and cultural bodies and received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.
Source: Tata Group
