5 things we wouldn’t have without JRD Tata;
July 29 in the birth anniversary of JRD Tata. JRD wore a lot of hats. He wasn’t just an industrialist he was also a keen aviator and a philanthropist. But what made JRD really stand out was his foresight. Several things that we enjoy today are all thanks to JRD’s beliefs. So what would we not have had it not been for JRD Tata?
1. Air India, India’s first commercial airline
In what is a well-documented story, JRD Tata founded the airlines that went on to be known as Air India. Founded in 1932, Tata flew its first aircraft that carried airmail from Karachi to Bombay and later continuing to Madras (present-day Chennai). Today, Air India has a fleet size of 109 aircraft, flies to 84 destinations and is India’s flag carrier airline. He is rightly called the father of Indian aviation
2. Tata Memorial, Asia’s first cancer hospital
The Tata Memorial Centre of Cancer, Research and Treatment is one of the best hospitals for cancer in the country. It is, in several ways, the final hope for several cancer patients who travel here from all corners of the country and indeed the continent. One of Tata Memoria’s specialities is acute lymphoblastic leukemia and it has a record of curing 99 per cent of the patients suffering from this particular form of cancer.
3. Titan Edge, world’s thinnest watch
Unlike Air India, Titan wasn’t the first Indian watch manufacturer. It is, however, the only one of the first three – Allwyn and HMT being the other two – that is still in business. Today Titan is the fifth largest watch manufacturer in the world and has the distinction of manufacturing the thinnest water-resistant watch in the world – Titan Edge that is just 1.15 mm thick with a case thickness of 3.5 mm. As with everything else in the list, Titan too was founded by JRD Tata… albeit at the suggestion of Xerxes Desai, who headed it till his retirement.
4. Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world
Sure, the credit for launching the much-publicised Nano goes to Ratan Tata, JRD’s successor. But none of the Tata cars we see today would have ever existed if it hadn’t been for JRD’s foresight of establishing TELCO, the company that we now know as Tata Motors, under whose roof Nano was rolled out.
5. Lakme, India’s first cosmetics brand
We bet you hadn’t known this one. The number one cosmetics brand in India may be owned by Hindustan Uniliver today but when it started out, Lakme was a 100 per cent subsidiary of Tata Oil Mills. The story of Lakme’s founding is just as fascinating. It was started in 1952 at the behest of the then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who seemed concerned that Indian women were spending foreign exchange on beauty products. And so it was at his personal request that JRD started out Lakme, named after the eponymous French opera. Interestingly, opera itself has an Indian connection; it is set in India and is named after its female protagonist, Lakme, a derivation of the Sanskrit, Laxmi.
