Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata was an Indian pioneer industrialist, who founded the Tata Group, India's biggest conglomerate company. Tata is regarded as the legendary "Father of Indian Industry".
Background
Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata was born to Nusserwanji and Jeevanbai Tata on 3 March 1839 in Navsari, a city in south Gujarat. His father, Nusserwanji, was the first businessman in a family of Parsi Zoroastrian priests. He broke the tradition to become the first member of the family to start a business. He started an export trading firm in Mumbai.
Education
He was educated at the Elphinstone College.
Career
In 1858 he entered his father's office, and began a commercial career of the highest eminence, beginning with cotton mills at Bombay and also at Nagpur, and ending with the formation of a company to work the iron ores of the Central Provinces on modern principles. One of his best-known achievements was the lowering of the freights on Indian goods to China and Japan, as the result of a long struggle with the Nippon Yusen Kaisha Co. He also introduced a silk industry after Japanese methods into Mysore, and built the Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay. But his greatest benefaction is the endowment of a research institute at Bangalore. He died at Nauheim, in Germany, on the 19th of May 1904.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"Freedom without the strength to support it and, if need be, defend it, would be a cruel delusion. And the strength to defend freedom can itself only come from widespread industrialisation and the infusion of modern science and technology into the country's economic life. "
"In a free enterprise the community is not just another stakeholder in the business but in fact the very existence of it. "
"There is one kind of charity common enough among us. .. It is that patchwork philanthropy which clothes the ragged, feeds the poor, and heals the sick. I am far from decrying the noble spirit which seeks to help a poor or suffering fellow being. .. [However] what advances a nation or a community is not so much to prop up its weakest and most helpless members, but to lift up the best and the most gifted, so as to make them of the greatest service to the country. "
"No Indian of the present generation had done more for the commerce and industry of India. "
"While many others worked on loosening the chains of slavery and hastening the march towards the dawn of freedom, Tata dreamed of and worked for life as it was to be fashioned after liberation. Most of the others worked for freedom from a bad life of servitude; Tata worked for freedom for fashioning a better life of economic independence. "
Connections
Tata married Hirabai Daboo. Their sons, Dorabji Tata and Ratanji Tata, succeeded Tata as the chairman of the Tata Group.