India’s Ratan
Ratan Naval Tata steps down as chairman of Tata Sons today and while the entire team at the $100 billion Tata conglomerate will surely feel his absence, the average Indian too will have reason to miss him. The country probably never needed Tata more than it does today; as The Economist wrote recently, ‘by standing out against graft so publicly and consistently, Mr Tata was ahead of his time’.
Not that the business suffered because of it; the diversified conglomerate that he has headed for more than two decades now has grown 20% annually since FY92 and at an even more impressive 30% in the last six years to March, 2012, a feat that not too many other business groups have been able to match. With a bit of luck, it may have done better but the fact remains that Tata chose to keep his distance from the political class and fortunately, for him, there weren’t too many occasions on which he needed to engage with it. On the few times that there was a skirmish, he took tough decisions as during the critical agitation over land in Singur West Bengal when the plant was re-located to Sanand in Gujarat. But more moving out, the Tatas had offered to buy 400 acres and gift it to the affected farmers in return for the land Tata Motors had used to set up its car plant. It was a fine gesture and the kind of generosity that sets the Tatas apart
