Aug 10, 2015 04:24 PM
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Book's name: The Life and Life Work of J. N. Tata by Dinsha Edulji Wacha
First published in 1914 by Ganesh & Co. Publishers, Madras.
At the start of the book is a report on the first Hydro electric plant of Tata Power. It has the details of the project with photographs.
A quick look at the board of directors shows the type of intellectual power they had.
It has a quick chapter on the career of Jamshetji, after that comes the introduction which briefly explains his family and initial schooling and general conditions in and around Navsari. How his initial career began, how he established good relations with Premchand Roychand who was an influential trader then. How the speculative trading practice of Roychand landed the merchants of Bombay into huge losses. J N Tata had the good fortune of supplying goods to the war efforts of Sir Robert Napier. That's what got him going again. Then he thought of setting up a cotton mill of his own, for which he went to Manchester to study the mills there.
Next chapter goes on to tell about how he went about establishing Empress Mills in Nagpur. This books at various places explains the labour situation in India at that time. One theme that always emerges is J N Tata was way ahead of his time. The type of yarn produced by Indian mills was coarse in nature, so Jamshetji wanted to produce fine yarn. For that he wanted to invest new type of spindles, he put his bet on a new technology about which experts were not convinced. He went with his gut feeling. When he planning to establish new mill for that, he got a bargain deal in form of Dharmsri Mills, which he renamed as Swadeshi Mills. He had to spend significant time and money to make it successful. Once these two mills had successful and were running smoothly under able administration. He set about realizing his bigger dreams. This was around 1895, his three dreams were
Establishing a Iron Ore manufacturing unit
Channeling the water from western ghats to generate power
Instituting a Scientific Research Institute.
It's ironic that all these dreams were realized after his passing away.
In 1895 Lord Hamilton imposed an excise duty on Indian Cotton Mills, that duty was detrimental to these mills and agitations broke out. Mills Association gave a memorandum to the government. When they went to meet Lord Hamilton, his reasoning was that mills were earning handsome in the range of 10 to 12% and mills in Manchester were also not earning such profit. Jamshetji argued that, it was not the case. He told he would become with full stats. He went about collecting detailed stats from all mills and used industrial statistics to show that profit was not more than 6% in the mills.
Another incident to be noted is, the cotton yarn was exported to China and Hong kong. The cubic feet tonne rate for transporting the material to Hong kong and Shanghai were Rs13 and 19 respectively, these were high rates as the shipping companies formed a group and did not budge down on the rates. Jamshetji established contacts with Japanese company and agreed a rate of Rs 2 per tonne, this was a blow to the british shipping companies. P&O ultimately brought down the rate to Re. 1, in that process Jamshetji lost money, but was successful in negotiating good rates for the mills.
Book then details how IISc was established, the lukewarm response of Lord Curzon for establishing such an institute, the help offered by Wodeyars of Mysore is all covered. Then the book covers how the hydel power plant was setup.
There is an entire chapter on the labor problems of those days. Some of the letter written to the govt have been printed verbatim.
In the chapter of Sociology and Public Affairs, book explains how he established new connections, how he went about finding new ideas, how he was always on the lookout for new things. His welfare schemes for the employees were way ahead of his times.
