Tata's legacy and twists in the tales

The 200-MBA students who crammed the IBS business school auditorium in Aundh on Wednesday evening must consider themselves extremely lucky to have got a first-hand account of the Tata saga from a Tata veteran, former managing director, Tata Services, TR Doongaji.

In his 150-minute power-point presentation titled ‘Glimpses of Tata’ commemorating JRD Tata’s death anniversary, Doongaji articulated with passion and humour the Tata story from Jamsetji
to Ratan.

Nobody as much as stirred in the auditorium as Doongaji took the audience back and forth from the 19th century to the 21st century.
Doongaji, who spent 42 years with the group, most of it with Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, said that it was the group’s intense commitment to honesty, integrity, customer satisfaction, community development and employee care which distinguished it from others.

Doongaji explained how the group founder, Jamsetji Tata started the Empress Mills in Nagpur in 1877 to provide affordable cotton textiles to Indians. Doongaji pointed out how Jamsetji even imported costly humidifiers from Manchester to make the production process more effective.

Pointing out the attention the group attached to employee care, Doongaji said that Empress Mills had established a special creche inside the mill for young mothers as early as 1880.
Similarly, the genesis of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai is equally interesting. Jamsetji Tata was refused entry into a restaurant. This prompted him to build, brick by brick, the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai in 1903.

According to Doongaji, Jamsetji wanted the hotel to be the best in the world and spared no effort in making it so. Doongaji highlighted the impartiality of the Tata group when he explained how the first beneficiary of the trust, created after the 26/11 terror attack on the Taj hotel, was an employee of the Oberoi group’s Trident hotel in Mumbai.

Explaining the commitment of the Tatas to their companies, Doongaji cited the case of Sir Dorabji Tata, older son of Jamsetji Tata who owned a mere 3% in Tata Steel.

Yet when the company went broke in 1924, he did not hesitate in mortgaging all his property and his wife’s jewellery for six whole months to bail the company out. “Tata Steel did not have money to pay salaries to its employees. This is when Sir Dorabji decided to bail the company out at high personal risk. This was the level of commitment that was consistently exhibited by the Tatas,” Doongaji said.

Doongaji also pointed out the business acumen of JRD Tata in starting the Tata Electric and Locomotive Company (Telco) in 1945 with a handful of German engineers, who were jobless after World War II.

Doongaji said, “It needed guts to bring in four-five engineers from Germany into British India in 1945. Yet, JRD persisted and the first Indian trucks with Mercedes Benz collaboration rolled out of the Telco factory in Jamshedpur in 1954.

Doongaji also highlighted the foresight the Tata group had vis-à-vis employee care. He explained how the Tatas introduced the provident fund scheme for their employees way back in 1901, a good 51 years before it became a law.

Likewise, the group also introduced the annual privilege leave scheme for employees in 1920, 28 years before it became a law. Doongaji finally capped his talk with an anecdote on Tata humility.
According to Doongaji, when JRD Tata was informed that he was going to be bestowed with a Bharat Ratna, he is reported to have told Ratan Tata, “Please tell the prime minister not to give me the Bharat Ratna. Why should I be given an award for simply serving my countrymen.”