From Raj days to post-liberalisation era
T. R. RAJAN
A CENTURY OF TRUST — The Story of Tata Steel: Rudrangshu Mukherjee; Penguin Portfolio; 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 399.
Almost running parallel with India’s liberalisation in early 1990s, at first the Tatas consolidated their presence in select industries and shed unnecessary flab; it was as if the Group was getting ready to go forth on a worldwide acquisition spree by the first decade of the 21st century. It is a tribute to the Group’s reputation and professionalism that their acquisition of Corus was not accompanied by controversies and rancour, which surrounded the Mittal-Arcelor deal.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee says in his preface to the book that he wanted “to give the history a narrative unity” and chose the theme of the company’s “struggle for survival against adverse circumstances” from the days of the British Raj through the two World Wars, post-Independence days, “permit-license-quota” Raj to the post-liberalisation phase. The book does indeed cover this period, by and large focussing on how the company managed to grow all the while coping with various stifling policies of the government of the day.
Transformation
It begins interestingly enough with what the author calls “Epilogue as Prologue”, a quick-fire narration of the events leading up to the Tata’s acquisition of Corus Steel. It whets our appetite for the flashback into the century-long history of the company. The author then takes us to the very beginning — Jamsetji Tata’s dream of “an industrialised and prosperous India” taking shape in the form of a quest to establish a steel plant in India. He passed on before he could see the plant in operation, but in his son Dorabji he had more than a worthy successor. These first few chapters are a delight to read, but then the dramatic story one is reading morphs into a prosaic and dull report.
Every stone and every tree in Tatanagar (a.k.a. Jamshedpur) can tell you a fascinating tale or two about the journey of the Tata Iron and Steel Company which started at the confluence of the rivers Khorkai and Subarnarekha and the transformation of an inhospitable terrain into a lovely town with a massive steel plant as its heart; and its fascinating metamorphosis into TISCO and thereafter Tata Steel. The book covers this transformation with the panache of an official gazette!
More than a dozen photographs/portraits of Tisco big bosses, who were literally nabobs of all that they surveyed, adorn the book, but with at the most perfunctory references, if at all, to most of them in the narrative. Each one of them played definitive roles in the transformation of the company into the giant it is today. Tata Steel was practising Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) long before such a concept was even recognised by industry. With so much rich history, the best is yet to be written.
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