Ratan Tata

• 1. Introduction

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  Ratan Tata spent three days standing outside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel while an armed operation played out inside. The attack came in November 2008, carried out by terrorists from the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Many lives were lost in the carnage. Tata did not leave until the operation was over. Afterward he resolved to restore the heritage of the hotel. He also chose to support the families of those who had died, and he visited victims' homes in person. That is a striking way for one of India's most powerful business figures to behave. This documentary asks how a man with a degree in architecture ended up steering a vast industrial group. It asks why he fought so hard to remake that group, and what happened when he tried to hand it on. It also asks what he did with the wealth and influence he left behind.

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• 2. A Divided Childhood

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  In 1948, when Ratan Tata was ten years old, his parents separated. He had been born in Bombay, now Mumbai, on the 28th of December 1937, into a Parsi family during the British Raj. His father, Naval Tata, had been born in Surat and later adopted into the Tata family. His mother, Soonoo, was a niece of Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the Tata Group. After the separation, Ratan was raised by his grandmother, Navajbai Tata, the widow of Ratanji Tata. She adopted him. The family grew complicated. He had a younger brother, Jimmy, and a half-brother, Noel, from his father's second marriage to Simone Tata. His mother's second marriage gave him two half-sisters, Shireen and Deanna Jeejebhoy. His schooling moved with him. He began at Campion School in Mumbai and continued at the Cathedral and John Connon School there. Later came Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, and he graduated from Riverdale Country School in New York City in 1955. At Cornell University he joined the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity and earned a bachelor's degree in architecture in 1962. He then took a job with the architectural firm Jones & Emmons in Los Angeles. Late in 1962 he returned to India, and the family business was waiting. He joined the Tata Group that year, starting on the shop floor of Tata Steel.

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• 3. Taking the Chair

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  A turnaround at National Radio and Electronics, known as NELCO, gave Tata his first taste of success in the 1970s. By then he held a managerial post in the group. The company later collapsed during an economic slowdown, so the early win did not last. In 1975 he also studied the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. Then came 1991. JRD Tata stepped down as chairman of Tata Sons and named Ratan as his successor. The welcome was cold. Under JRD, the heads of the various subsidiaries had enjoyed a great deal of operational freedom, and they pushed back hard against the new chairman. Tata answered by concentrating authority at the centre. He introduced a retirement age. Subsidiaries now had to report directly to the group office. They were also required to contribute part of their profit toward building the Tata brand. He put weight on innovation and handed many responsibilities to younger talent. Overlapping operations were folded into company-wide ones, and the group left unrelated businesses behind. This clearing of the decks prepared the ground for something far larger.

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• 4. Going Global

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  Over the 21 years of Tata's leadership, group revenue grew more than 40 times, and profit rose more than 50 times. The mix of what the group sold changed as well. Commodities had dominated sales when he arrived. By the end of his tenure, most sales came from brands. The boldest moves were overseas purchases. Tata Tea bought Tetley, Tata Motors bought Jaguar Land Rover, and Tata Steel bought Corus. Together these deals turned an India-centred group into a global one, with over 65 percent of revenues coming from international operations and sales. At home, he conceived and drove the Tata Nano, a car aimed at ordinary Indian buyers. It followed the strong success of the diesel Tata Indica, and both were meant to put cars within reach of the average Indian consumer. Years later, Tata Motors rolled out its first batch of Tigor Electric Vehicles at its Sanand plant in Gujarat. Tata described that car as fast-forwarding India's electric dream. His own retirement would prove far less smooth than any of these launches.

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• 5. The Succession Fight

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  On the 28th of December 2012, his 75th birthday, Ratan Tata resigned his executive powers in the group. What followed was a leadership crisis that drew intense media scrutiny. The board chose Cyrus Mistry as successor. Mistry was a relative of Tata and the son of Pallonji Mistry of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, then the largest individual shareholder in the Tata group. The arrangement ended abruptly on the 24th of October 2016, when Tata Sons removed Mistry as chairman. Tata, then 78 years old, returned as interim chairman, and he sat on the selection committee that searched for a permanent leader. On the 12th of January 2017, Natarajan Chandrasekaran was named chairman, and he took over the role in February. That same month Mistry was also removed as a director of Tata Sons. The legal fight ran on for years. In December 2019, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal found the removal of Mistry as chairman illegal and ordered his reinstatement. On appeal, India's Supreme Court upheld the dismissal. Tata's attention, in the meantime, had been drifting toward a quite different kind of company.

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• 6. Betting on Start-ups

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  Over the course of his life, Ratan Tata backed more than 40 start-ups. Most of those bets came from his own pocket, and some ran through his firm, RNT Capital Advisors. He put money into Snapdeal, which was then among India's leading e-commerce sites. In January 2016 he invested in Teabox, an online seller of premium Indian tea, and in CashKaro.com, a discount coupon and cash-back website. His stake in Ola Cabs was small, at INR 0.95 crore. In April 2015 it was reported that he had acquired a stake in the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. In 2016 he backed Nestaway, an online real-estate portal. Nestaway later acquired Zenify to launch Dogspot, a real-estate and pet-care portal. Then in February 2015 he took an advisory role at Kalari Capital, a venture capital firm founded by Vani Kola. One venture was personal in spirit. Goodfellows, a companionship start-up for senior citizens, aimed to encourage friendships across generations. Its founder, Shantanu Naidu, became Tata's mentee and executive assistant, and his name returns at the end of this story.

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• 7. The Giving

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  After the violence of 1984 that targeted Sikhs, Tata's gift took the form of trucks. Through Tata Motors he donated vehicles to Sikh drivers who had lost theirs, so they could earn a living again. Drivers in Punjab and elsewhere in India have stayed loyal customers of Tata trucks since. Education drew his largest gifts. In 2008 he gave Cornell $50 million, making him the largest international donor in its history. The Tata Education and Development Trust later endowed a $28 million scholarship fund for Indian undergraduates at Cornell, supporting about 20 scholars at a time. In 2010, Tata Group companies and charities gave $50 million toward an executive center at Harvard Business School. It was named Tata Hall, with total construction costs estimated at $100 million. The building stands seven stories tall, with about 180 bedrooms for mid-career students. In 2016 the Tata Trusts gave $70 million to UC San Diego to create the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society, which studies gene editing, stem cell therapy and disease control. Its own Tata Hall opened in November 2018. It has seven stories and 128,000 square feet, and it is LEED-certified. Other gifts reached further. The Tata Innovation Center at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island is a business incubator that is 70 percent commercially leased. In 2014, the group endowed the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, creating the Tata Centre for Technology and Design. MIT received a sister centre aimed at resource-constrained communities, with an initial focus on India. A grant to the Indian Institute of Science would run for five years from 2014 to study Alzheimer's disease. The University of New South Wales worked on capacitive deionisation to improve water for challenged areas. His compassion also reached animals. In June 2024, Tata appealed on Instagram for volunteers to give blood for a critically ill stray dog at his animal hospital in Mumbai.

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• 8. Honours and Farewell

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  Ratan Tata died at 23:30 IST on the 9th of October 2024 at Breach Candy Hospital, aged 86, from age-related issues. He had been admitted in critical condition and placed in intensive care. The governments of Maharashtra and Jharkhand each announced a day of mourning. On the 10th of October he received a state funeral, with last rites at the Parsi crematorium at Worli. The Mumbai Police provided a ceremonial guard of honour, a 21-gun salute was fired, and his body was wrapped in the Indian flag. His will, made public afterward, revealed a life of loyalties. A charitable trust established in 2022, the Ratan Tata Endowment Foundation, was to receive a significant portion of his wealth, including shares in Tata Motors and Tata Sons. His half-sisters were named executors. Mohini Mohan Dutta, a Jamshedpur-based entrepreneur and former Tata Group employee, was entitled to one-third of the residual estate. For Shantanu Naidu, Tata gave up his stake in Goodfellows and waived the education loan for Naidu's MBA at Cornell. Household staff, office employees and even a neighbour had personal loans waived. Named bequests went to people such as the cook Rajan Shaw and the butler Subbaiah Konar. His German Shepherd, Tito, was provided for. The estate included a 2,000-square-foot beach bungalow in Alibaug, a two-story home in Mumbai and a collection of 20 to 30 luxury cars, which the group might display in a museum or auction. He asked that his clothes, including Brioni suits and Hermes ties, go to NGOs for distribution to the underprivileged. Tata never married. In 2011 he said he had come close four times, and each time he backed off. The honours he gathered along the way ran long. India gave him the Padma Bhushan in 2000 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2008. France named him Commander of the Legion of Honour in 2016. In 2023 he became an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia. In 2021, Naidu published a memoir of his years beside Tata, titled I Came Upon a Lighthouse. And on the 29th of December 2025, Air India Express received its first Boeing 737 MAX 8, registered VT-RNT in his honour.

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