The Man Who Built a Nation of Steel

In 1902, an ageing businessman sat down to write a letter to his son.

He was not writing about money. He was describing a town that did not yet exist. It should have wide streets, he wrote, planted with fast-growing shade trees. There should be space for lawns and gardens, for football and hockey, and places of worship for every faith. The houses for the workers should be good ones.

There was no steel plant yet for this town to serve. There was not even a site. But Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata could already see it.

A priest's son from Navsari

He was born on 3 March 1839 in Navsari, a small town in Gujarat, into a Parsi family of priests. His father, Nusserwanji, broke with family tradition and became a trader in Bombay.

The boy followed him there and studied at Elphinstone College. After he graduated, he joined his father's trading business, which sent him to China and later to England. In the mills of Lancashire he watched how cotton was spun and woven by machine, and he began to wonder why India grew the cotton but bought the cloth.

Not every venture went well. In the mid-1860s, when a cotton boom in Bombay suddenly crashed, his father's business was badly hurt, and the family had to work for years to recover. In 1868 Jamsetji started a trading company of his own, in a modest way.

The mill at Nagpur

His first great gamble was a cotton mill. Instead of building in Bombay, where every mill-owner was, he chose Nagpur, in the middle of the country, close to the cotton fields and to good coal.

The Empress Mill opened on 1 January 1877. In its early years there were problems with the machinery and the quality of the cotton, and Jamsetji had to replace equipment and rethink how the mill was run.

What made the mill unusual was how it treated its workers. At a time when factory hands in India worked long hours with almost no protection, Jamsetji's mills introduced things that were rare anywhere in the world: a provident fund to save for old age, accident payments, and better working conditions. He believed that healthy, secure workers made a healthy business. He also bought a struggling mill in Bombay and, slowly, turned it around.

By his fifties he was a wealthy man. He could have stopped there.

Three dreams

Instead, he turned to three ideas that most people around him thought were impossible for an Indian to achieve under British rule.

The first was steel. India had iron ore and coal, but almost no modern steel industry. The story goes that he had heard the writer Thomas Carlyle argue that the nation that gained control of iron would soon gain control of gold, and he believed India could not stand on its own feet without its own steel.

The second was electricity. He wanted to use the heavy monsoon rains of the Western Ghats to make hydroelectric power for Bombay's mills, so that the city would be cleaner and its industry cheaper to run.

The third was a university for science. In 1893, on a ship crossing from Japan to North America, he met a young monk named Swami Vivekananda, who was on his way to speak in Chicago. The two men talked about India's future. A few years later Jamsetji offered a large part of his fortune to found an institute of research, and Vivekananda wrote in support of the plan.

The long search

Each dream ran into walls. Government officials were doubtful. Investors in London would not put money into an Indian steel company. Experts said Indian ore was too poor, or too far away.

Jamsetji kept going. He travelled to America to study steel plants and hired experienced engineers to search for the right place. Prospectors spent years walking through the forests and hills of central and eastern India, looking for ore, coal, water and limestone close enough together to make steel.

His health was failing. On 19 May 1904, while travelling in Germany, Jamsetji Tata died. He was sixty-five. Not one of his three great dreams had been completed.

What his sons finished

His sons, Dorabji and Ratanji, and the people he had trained, carried on.

The search team found rich iron ore in Mayurbhanj, in what is now Odisha, with the help of the geologist P. N. Bose. A site was chosen near the village of Sakchi, where two rivers met. When the Tata Iron and Steel Company was formed in 1907, the money was not raised in London after all. It came from thousands of ordinary Indians, who queued to buy shares in a company of their own. The first steel was made in 1912.

The town grew up around the plant, much as the letter had described, and it was named Jamshedpur in his honour.

The Indian Institute of Science was founded in Bangalore in 1909. The hydroelectric scheme began supplying power to Bombay in 1915.

Want to read more?

R. M. Lala's For the Love of India is a warm, readable life of Jamsetji Tata. F. R. Harris's Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, written by a family member in the 1920s, is the earliest full account and draws on his letters.