THE TITAN

The man who placed India on the international map

JRD was a nationalist as well as an internationalist,” recalls F.C. Kohli, founder and first CEO of Tata Consultancy Services. “That is why he agreed to be on the board of Air India even after it was nationalised. He was a great human being, and encouraged the staff to aim higher each time.” When Kohli asked JRD’s permission to shift the TCS office to the Air India building in 1971, his first response was whether the software company, then a fledgling firm, could afford it. “I promised him we would find our own resources, and we did,’’ says Kohli, 92, who still has an office in the iconic building in Mumbai’s Nariman Point. Kohli says that had the government not nationalised Air India, it would have been ranked amongst the top aviation companies in the world, thanks to JRD’s vision.

Apart from Air India and TCS, JRD steered the group into new avenues that included Tata Motors, Titan Industries, Tata Tea and Voltas. From the 14 enterprises he inherited, he built an empire comprising 95 companies by the time he retired in 1988, taking the business of the Tata Group from $100 million, when he took over, to over $5 billion. Under his guidance as a trustee, the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust established Asia’s first cancer hospital, the Tata Memorial Centre, in Bombay in 1941. JRD also founded the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the National Centre for Performing Arts. He was also a founding member of the National Council of Applied Economic Research.