2025 has been a rather busy year for India Inc. From corporate dramas, insolvencies, aviation meltdowns, to billion-rupee frauds and boardroom coups, we have seen it all and more. Of course, the Tata Trust impasse grabbed headlines the most, while the unravelling of the Gensol discrepancies was no less exciting than a thriller.
Here are the most defining corporate controversies of the year, each a reminder that growth stories are fragile but governance failures are loud.
The big, loud Tata war
One of India’s most trusted conglomerates spent a sizeable portion of 2025 firefighting a crisis, not from markets, but from within. A bitter feud erupted within Tata Trusts, which controls 66% of Tata Sons. At the centre of the fight lay governance authority, board nominations, and the question of whether Tata Sons should eventually list.
At the centre of the fight: governance authority, board nominations, and whether Tata Sons should eventually list. The conflict exploded after a September meeting where Tata Trusts proposed a new rule requiring annual reappointment of Tata Sons nominee-directors once they turned 75, seen as a direct attempt to remove former Defence Secretary Vijay Singh. Singh instead resigned, signalling the crisis had become unmanageable.
Trustee Mehli Mistry, accused of leading a faction trying to become a “super board,” was reportedly removed as tension escalated. As per news reports, the government also stepped in, concerned about a repeat of the 2016 Tata–Cyrus Mistry blowout.
The curious case of Sona Comstar
After the sudden and unfortunate death of chairman Sunjay Kapur in June, Sona BLW Precision Forgings plunged into a deeply personal and very public family feud. Sunjay’s mother, Rani Kapur, accused individuals in the company of coercing her into signing documents behind locked doors and acting on her behalf without authorisation. She called for the AGM to be postponed, alleging a bid to seize control amid her grief.
Instead, the AGM proceeded and appointed Sunjay’s wife, Priya Sachdev Kapur, to the board as an additional non-executive director. The company retaliated with a cease-and-desist notice accusing Rani Kapur of ‘malafide’ and ‘unwarranted’ claims.
Despite the controversy unfolding at home, the company has continued announcing new orders and joint ventures as per news reports. As of 16 December, Sona BLW’s Precision Forgings market cap stands at Rs 30,194 crore, with the share price rising 1.21% in the past six months.
Gensol’s EV dream
In April 2025, SEBI barred Gensol Engineering promoters Anmol and Puneet Jaggi from the markets on allegations of large-scale fraud and fund diversion. As per an earlier report by financialexpress.com, loans worth Rs 975 crore had been raised from institutions like IREDA and PFC in the name of boosting the clean mobility business. However, SEBI found out that only a portion of these funds was used.
Only 4,704 of the 6,400 EVs were bought; the rest of the money allegedly travelled through shell companies linked to promoters, funding luxury apartments, foreign trips, a Jaguar, and even golf club memberships. SEBI ordered a forensic audit and froze new equity actions.
Then the fallout – BluSmart defaulted on payments, suspended operations across all cities, and saw its board resign en masse. As of April, Gensol Electric Vehicle, the EV manufacturing subsidiary of Gensol Engineering, laid off all its employees and shut its operations on 30 April. As a result of this alleged misappropriation of funds, the share price has seen a free fall of over 95% year to date leading to big losses for investors.
IndusInd Bank’s scandal
A seemingly technical accounting discrepancy turned into one of the banking sector’s biggest reputational blows in years. IndusInd Bank reported a Rs 1,500–1,600 crore accounting discrepancy caused by mis-recorded internal derivatives trades and dual accounting methods, profits that “existed” only on paper.
More troubling: management had known about the issue for nearly five months before it was disclosed. A forensic review revealed that CEO Sumant Kathpalia and Deputy CEO Arun Khurana sold shares worth a combined approximately Rs 188 crore during that window, igniting insider trading allegations.
Both resigned, RBI imposed penalties, and Mumbai Police opened investigations. The bank’s stock dropped 27% in a single day.
For a lender of this size, the scandal reignited questions about audit rigour, oversight quality, and whether Indian banks are as governance-strong as their balance sheets suggest. The company’s Chairman Sunil Mehta will step down after his term concludes in January 2026, as per Reuters. This is followed by the private bank’s largest-ever quarterly loss in the quarter ending 31 March, financialexpress.com reported earlier.
The edtech darling Byju’s
What started as a missed payment of Rs 158 crore to the BCCI for jersey sponsorship snowballed into one of India’s most high-profile corporate collapses. Although this started in 2024, many of the updates happened this year. In July 2024, the NCLT admitted an insolvency plea against Think & Learn Pvt Ltd, Byju’s parent. Through 2025, the company remained in limbo as the board was suspended, assets frozen, and creditors seized control.
Once valued at $22 billion, Byju’s burned through Rs 38,047 crore of investor capital. Its US arm had already filed for Chapter 11. This was followed by layoffs, delayed salaries and shutdowns. As per news reports, the insolvency proceedings remain ongoing and disputed in courts, with settlement negotiations continuing through 2025.
Indigo’s December meltdown
India’s largest airline, carrying 60% of domestic passengers, collapsed into chaos in November–December 2025, cancelling more than 1,600 flights in a single day. The trigger behind the meltdown was pilot fatigue rules and the company’s failure to prepare despite DGCA giving a full year’s notice.
The airline’s operational model of high utilisation and minimal crew buffers buckled instantly. The government was forced to step in, and DGCA temporarily rolled back its own fatigue rules, an extraordinary move that underscored the gravity of IndiGo’s failure.
IndiGo soon released reassuring statements promising full refunds and vowed to get the operations back to normal soon enough.
AirIndia’s Dreamliner Crash
Air India suffered one of the worst aviation disasters on 12 June 2025, which involved an Indian carrier. Flight AI171 crashing after takeoff from Ahmedabad, killing 241 of the 242 people on board. The crash raised longstanding issues like chronic maintenance lapses, delayed aircraft upgrades, DGCA penalties over fatigue violations, etc. The tragedy cast a shadow on Tata’s ambition to restore Air India’s reputation, showing that legacy engineering debt is harder to fix than balance sheets or branding.
The TCS layoff concerns
In a move that stirred debates over workforce practices in India’s IT sector, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) faced scrutiny over layoffs at its Pune campuses. The Maharashtra government, citing information from the company, said 376 employees were retrenched over two quarters of the fiscal, primarily from middle and senior managerial positions, and clarified that the layoffs were not linked to AI or automation.
However, employee advocacy group Forum for IT Employees (FITE) disputed this figure, claiming that nearly 2,000–2,500 staff had been forced to leave in recent months, including “silent layoffs” where employees were pressured to quit, as per an IE report.
FITE further said that TCS has taken a very callous treatment, adding that many of the affected employees were working with the company for over a decade, and questioned why the company, which declared a dividend of over Rs 45,600 crore last year, failed to adequately compensate those exiting.
As per the Q2FY26 results, the company recorded a net profit of Rs 12,075 crore, whereas the revenue was Rs 65,799 crore.
Was 2025 a stress test India Inc failed?
From trustee infighting to death-triggered succession wars, insolvency, financial fraud, insider trading, and aviation disasters, 2025 forced India Inc. to confront uncomfortable truths. We can only wait and see what 2026 holds in store.