Tata is the name of a family prominent in the industrial and commercial life of India.
Jeejibhoy Jamsetji Tata
(1783-1859) was a leading industrialist. He was born into a poor Parsi family in the princely state of Baroda. He made a fortune in the export business through commercial insight and hard work. He also started a family tradition of giving generously to charity.
Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata
(1839-1904), also spelled Jamshedji Nasarwanji, greatly expanded the Tata family’s business empire. He did much to develop India’s cotton, power, and steel industries. Jamsetji Tata built the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, one of the finest hotels in Asia. The Tata Group companies still operate the Taj chain of luxury hotels. Jamsetji Tata also donated money to set up the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. He was born on March 3, 1839, in Navsari, Gujarat. He died on May 19, 1904. His two sons further enlarged the family business, establishing the Tata Iron and Steel Company in 1907 and founding the steel town of Jamshedpur in Bihar state in 1909.
Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata
(1904-1993) served as chairman of the Tata Group of companies from 1938 to 1991. He was popularly known as J. R. D. He is generally recognized as the father of commercial aviation in India. J. R. D. Tata became one of the first people in India to qualify for a pilot’s license. He founded Tata Airways (now part of Air India), India’s first commercial airline, in 1932 and served as chairman and member of the board of Air India from 1946 to 1978. J. R. D. Tata also founded the company now known as Tata Motors in 1945.
J. R. D. Tata was born in Paris on July 29, 1904, and died in Geneva, Switzerland, on Nov. 29, 1993.
Ratan N. Tata
(1937–…) is the great-grandson of Jamsetji Tata. Ratan Tata was chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company of Tata Group, from 1991 to 2012, when he retired. Under Ratan Tata’s leadership, the company made a large number of acquisitions, including a tea company, a chemical company, a steel company, and the British automobile brands Land Rover and Jaguar. Ratan Tata was responsible for many innovative Tata products, including the inexpensive Nano automobile produced by Tata Motors. As the lifetime chairman of Tata Trusts, which controls Tata Sons, Ratan Tata is involved in philanthropy and charitable organizations. In 2016, Ratan Tata briefly came out of retirement to serve as interim chairman of Tata Sons until a new chairman was named to replace his successor, ousted chairman Cyrus Mistry. In early 2017, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, popularly known as Chandra, became head of the conglomerate. Chandra previously led the Tata subsidiary Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an information technology services firm. A subsidiary is a company that is partly owned or controlled by a larger company.
Ratan Tata was born in Mumbai on Dec. 28, 1937. He received his bachelor’s degree in architecture and engineering from Cornell University in the United States in 1962.
