Ratanji Tata
Encyclopedia
Sir Ratan Tata was a Parsi
Parsi
Parsi or Parsee refers to a member of the larger of the two Zoroastrian communities in South Asia, the other being the Irani community....

 financier and philanthropist.

Biography

He was the son of the noted Parsi merchant Jamsetji Tata
Jamsetji Tata
Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata was an Indian entrepreneur and industrialist, prominent for his pioneering work in Indian industry. He was born to a Parsi family in Navsari, Gujarat, India....

. Ratan Tata was educated at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, and afterwards entered his father's firm. On the death of the elder Tata in 1904, Ratan Tata and his brother Dorabji Tata
Dorabji Tata
Sir Dorabji Tata , was an Indian industrialist and philanthropist, and a key figure in the history and development of the Tata industrial empire...

 inherited a very large fortune, much of which they devoted to philanthropic works of a practical nature and to the establishment of various industrial enterprises for developing the resources of India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

.

An Indian institute of scientific and medical research(Indian Institute of Science
Indian Institute of Science
Indian Institute of Science is a research institution of higher learning located in Bangalore, India. It was established in 1909.-History:After a chance meeting between Jamsetji N...

),(IISc) was founded at Mysore in 1905, and in 1912 the Tata Iron and Steel Co.
Tata Steel
Tata Steel is a multinational steel company headquartered in Jamshedpur, India and part of Tata Group. It is the world's seventh-largest steel company, with an annual crude steel capacity of 31 million tonnes, and the largest private-sector steel company in India measured by domestic production...

 began work at Sakchi
Sakchi
Sakchi was the village in north east India which was selected by Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata to be the location of a planned steel city, which in 1919 became Jamshedpur. Sakchi is now part of the city between the Tata Steel site and the river Subarnarekha....

, in the Central Provinces
Central Provinces
The Central Provinces was a province of British India. It comprised British conquests from the Mughals and Marathas in central India, and covered parts of present-day Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra states. Its capital was Nagpur....

, with marked success. The most important of the Tata enterprises, however, was the storing of the water power of the Western Ghats
Western Ghats
The Western Ghats, Western Ghauts or the Sahyādri is a mountain range along the western side of India. It runs north to south along the western edge of the Deccan Plateau, and separates the plateau from a narrow coastal plain along the Arabian Sea. The Western Ghats block rainfall to the Deccan...

 (1915), which provided Mumbai with an enormous amount of electrical power, and hence vastly increased the productive capacity of its industries. Sir Ratan Tata, who was knighted in 1916, did not confine his benefactions to India. In England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, where he had a permanent residence at York House, Twickenham
Twickenham
Twickenham is a large suburban town southwest of central London. It is the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and one of the locally important district centres identified in the London Plan...

.

In 1912 he founded The Ratan Tata department of social science and administration at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

, and also established a Ratan Tata fund at the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...

 for studying the conditions of the poorer classes.

Personal life

He married Navajbai Sett in In 1892 and left for England in 1915. He died on September 5, 1918 at St Ives in Cornwall, England and was buried at Brookwood Cemetery
Brookwood Cemetery
Brookwood Cemetery is a burial ground in Brookwood, Surrey, England. It is the largest cemetery in the United Kingdom and one of the largest in western Europe.-History:...

near London by the side of his father.

Legacy

After his death the Sir Ratan Tata Trust was founded in 1919, with a corpus of Rs. 8 million.

External links

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