Nerves of Steel

The Tata group has a history of grit and is no stranger to big-ticket acquisitions. But its bid for loss-making airline Air India could be its litmus test.

- ANSHUL DHAMIJA

“I don’t believe in taking right decisions, I take decisions and make them right.” That’s one of the most-shared social media quotes of Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, the holding company of the over $105-billion in revenue Tata group. However, in an interview, when asked about this philosophy, Tata clarified, “I’m sorry… that statement was never made by me. It’s become a default statement, and you come to know of it when people read it back to you.”

That said, the Tata group, which touches the lives of Indian consumers in so many ways—from selling salt to jewellery to providing a direct-to-home linear television service—in a strange way echoes the philosophy of that “default statement”. And there is history to it.

J.N. Gupta, the founder and managing director of Stakeholders Empowerment Services (SES), a corporate governance research and advisory firm, says that “nobody believed that they could do it” when Tata Iron and Steel Company (now Tata Steel) was set up in 1907. “Everybody made fun of them, but they did it. And when you have that type of grit in you, you do not want to do one thing in life,” says Gupta, summarising the group’s diversification into sectors such as information technology, consumer and retail, automotive, financial services, tourism and travel, and aerospace and defence, to name some. There were 29 publicly-listed Tata companies with a combined market capitalisation of $123 billion as on March 31, 2020.