TATA STEEL IS ORIGINAL MAKE IN INDIA STORY, SAYS GLOBAL CEO

 Tata Steel has become one of the leading steel manufacturers across the globe in the last 116 years. The company is hopeful of lasting another 100 years on the back of its multi-generational employees and a people-centric work culture. With clear focus and targets in sight, T.V. Narendran, chief executive officer and managing director of Tata Steel, tells Suchetana Ray and Rajat Mishra how a large part of its future growth will take place in India due to the infra push of the government and its investment in future and sustainable technology

-  Suchetana Ray and Rajat Mishra

How has Tata Steel navigated challenges in the last 100 years?

Tata Steel, obviously, is the original Make in India story. The idea of Atmanirbhar Bharat that we are talking about is what drove the founder of the Tata Group to set up Tata Steel, Tata Power and Indian Institute of Science, among other notable institutions of modern India. But what is interesting about the origins of Tata Steel is that the best talent was brought from across the world to build the steel plant and a township. So, you had the Americans running blast furnaces, the Germans running a steel mill shop and the English running or rolling mills. Those days, it took months to come by ship to India from Europe or America. There were no telephones, so you wrote letters to your family. Imagine the kind of sacrifices people made and the challenges they took to come and build the steel plant here. It is an incredible story.

As the steel plant was being built, World War I broke out, and that came with its own set of challenges. When you have the Germans, the Americans and the British working together, it has its own set of dynamics. It was in recognition of Tata Steel’s contribution to World War I that the British renamed the town of Sakchi as Jamshedpur in honour of the founder Jamsetji Tata.

The 1920s obviously were a challenging time for Tata Steel. I do not know if you know that Mahatma Gandhi sent Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose as the union leader in Tata Steel, saying that India’s first industrial experiment should not fail. We also went through the pandemic, and then there was another world war where, yet again, we played a very big role. The Tatanagar Armoured Car was very successful. It was made from the steel of Tata Steel and the engineering of Tata Motors.