Jamsetji Tata Died in 1904 Having Planned India's Steel Works, Science Institute and Hydropower Scheme, and All Three Were Running by 1915

Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata died on 19 May 1904 at Nauheim in Germany, aged 65. Within eleven years the three projects he had spent his last years preparing were all in service. The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore opened to 24 students in 1911. The Tata steelworks at Sakchi rolled its first steel ingot on 16 February 1912. The Governor of Bombay switched on hydroelectric power from the Western Ghats for the city’s mills on 11 February 1915.

Two other things he finished himself, the Empress Mills in Nagpur (opened 1 January 1877) and the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay (opened 16 December 1903). F. R. Harris’s 1925 chronicle of his life quotes his letters, and the Tata archives, the Indian Institute of Science and the companies keep the dates. His elder son Dorabji carried the steel and power companies forward, and the Institute also needed land and money from Mysore and the Government of India. A later chapter of the family business, the airline that first flew in 1932, is told in J. R. D. Tata and the first Indian airline.

A Nagpur cotton mill that paid 16 per cent by 1881

Aged 29, in 1868, Tata began with a trading company and Rs 21,000. A failed oil mill at Chinchpokli in Bombay became his in 1869; he turned it into the Alexandra cotton mill and sold it at a profit two years later, according to the Tata Group’s own story of the firm and to Harris.

His next mill went 500 miles inland. Bombay’s mill owners, Harris writes, laughed at the idea. Nagpur won on four counts: cotton grew in the district, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway ended there, coal came from the Warora mines and land was cheap. The Central India Spinning, Weaving and Manufacturing Company, promoted in 1874, had Rs 15 lakh in 3,000 shares of Rs 500 each. It opened on 1 January 1877, the day Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, and took the name Empress Mills. It started with 15,552 throstle spindles, 14,400 mule spindles and 450 looms.

Harris records a costly early error: Tata bought cheaper English machinery, the yarn came out poor and the shares fell to half their face value. After re-equipping in 1878 the company paid a 16 per cent dividend in 1881. From 1883 two ring-spinning frames went through a long trial at Nagpur, when Harris says the machine was still unproven in Lancashire, and the mills’ output nearly doubled. Over its first eighteen annual reports the company averaged a profit close to 20 per cent.

Harris’s account adds a provident scheme and a pension fund, the first of their kind in any Indian mill by his reckoning, and the first proper ventilation and air-humidifying equipment in India. An apprenticeship system let a young hand rise through the firm.

The Taj, opened on 16 December 1903

A ninety-nine-year lease on about 10,000 square yards of reclaimed land at Apollo Bunder, from the Bombay Port Trust, gave Tata the site, and the hotel’s foundations went in during 1898. He took up the whole Rs 25 lakh share capital himself, Harris says. Equipment came in 1902 from London, Dusseldorf, Berlin and Paris, including electric lighting, lifts and engines.

According to the Tata Group’s heritage pages, the hotel opened on 16 December 1903 and was the first building in Bombay to be electrified. It opened with about twenty visitors in Harris’s telling and 17 according to the Tata Central Archives. Harris gives the cost as nearly £300,000, and the Group’s newsroom says more than £300,000. Notes by Tata’s assistant A. J. Bilimoria, which Harris used, say Tata considered an up-to-date hotel “one of the essential conditions of the city’s advancement.”

A research university, pledged in 1898

The Indian Institute of Science’s own history dates the idea to 1889, when Tata heard Lord Reay, the Governor of Bombay, speak at a University of Bombay convocation. By September 1893, when he met Swami Vivekananda on a steamer from Japan to North America (the crossing that took the Swami to Chicago), the idea was four years old. His letter of 23 November 1898 to the Swami, from Esplanade House in Bombay, recalled it: “I trust you remember me as a fellow-traveller on your voyage from Japan to Chicago.” He suggested that Vivekananda begin with a pamphlet to rouse the country for a research institute, and offered to pay for its publication.

The money was property. Per the Tata Central Archives, he set aside fourteen buildings and four landed properties in Bombay in September 1898, worth Rs 30 lakh (Rs 3 million) at the time. Harris adds that the actual offer was property yielding about Rs 1.25 lakh a year, which people capitalised and called Rs 30 lakh. On the annual figure the Institute’s own history agrees: Tata’s endowment supplied Rs 1.25 lakh a year.

A provisional committee under the educationist Burjorji Padshah drew up the scheme. A delegation led by Tata put it to the new Viceroy, Lord Curzon, on 31 December 1898. Curzon asked whether enough students and jobs would exist, Harris reports, and Tata read the cautious reply as a new Viceroy not wishing to commit himself. At Simla in October 1899 a Government conference agreed in principle. Seshadri Iyer, the Dewan of Mysore, offered land and money. Sir William Ramsay’s report of early 1901 recommended Bangalore.

Tata did not live to see it. A Government of India vesting order created the Institute on 27 May 1909. Mysore’s Durbar gave 371 acres, Rs 5 lakh for buildings and Rs 50,000 a year, and the Government added Rs 87,500 a year. The Institute opened its doors to 24 students in 1911.

Steel: a plan that waited from 1882 for the right rules, engineers and ore

A government report on the Chanda district by the German expert Ritter von Schwarz first drew Tata to Indian iron in 1882. His plan was to work the ore with coal from the Warora mine, and he asked for control of the branch railway that served it. The government would not hand over a coal mine and a railway to a private company, and he dropped the plan, Harris writes. India had made fine steel long before, as the story of wootz shows. That older industry, Harris says, never moved on to modern methods.

Two things changed in 1899 and 1900. Lord Curzon’s government revised the mining and prospecting rules in 1899. Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, received Tata in London in the summer of 1900. Hamilton told him the Government of India had found the man it had been looking for, Harris reports, and promised help. The Tata Central Archives dates the support to 1900.

In September 1902 Tata sailed for the United States. At Pittsburgh he met the engineer Julian Kennedy, who advised a thorough survey and recommended Charles Page Perin of New York. Perin’s associate C. M. Weld started prospecting in India. Surveys found rich ore at Dhalli and Rajhara, and coal from the Jharia field. Samples of coal and ore were sent to Germany and America and smelted there, and the reports, Harris says, were highly satisfactory. By the time the survey camp moved to the Mahanadi river, Harris says, the preliminary work had cost more than £30,000.

That year, 1902, he also wrote to his son Dorabji about the town the works would need: “Be sure to lay wide streets planted with shady trees, every other of a quick-growing variety.” On 24 February 1904 the geologist Pramatha Nath Bose wrote to Tata about iron ore in the Gorumahisani hills of Mayurbhanj, a letter Tata Steel’s profile of Bose says led to the works at Sakchi.

Tata died three months later. The Tata Steel annual report records the 1907 share issue: nearly Rs 232 lakh raised from about 8,000 people within three weeks, in Dorabji’s words a “Swadeshi enterprise financed by Swadeshi money and managed by Swadeshi brains.” Tata Investment Corporation dates the issue to 26 August 1907, the explorers’ arrival at Sakchi to December 1907 and the first stake in the ground to 27 February 1908. Ironmaking had begun by December 1911, Harris says, and the first steel ingot was rolled on 16 February 1912. Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, renamed the town Jamshedpur and its station Tatanagar on 2 January 1919.

The Group’s newsroom adds that a railway official, Sir Frederick Upcott, had promised to “eat every pound of steel rail” the Tatas succeeded in making.

Water from the Ghats for Bombay’s mills

Water power had interested Tata since 1875, when he negotiated for land at the Jubbulpore falls on the Narmada and the talks failed. Robert Miller, a Bombay merchant, brought him an option on the Doodh-Sagar falls in 1897, and Tata sent the engineer David Gostling to assess it. Gostling proposed a different design: store the monsoon in lakes near Lonavla, about 2,000 feet above Bombay, and drop the water to a power house at Khopoli. One hilltop in the catchment had recorded 546 inches of rain in a single monsoon, Harris notes.

Hamilton received the plan from Tata and passed the correspondence to the Governor of Bombay, Lord Northcote. At Pittsburgh in 1902 he also met George Westinghouse and, on Westinghouse’s guidance, made a special trip to Niagara to see the machinery there. Electricity appealed to him, Harris says, because it would make Bombay’s industry less dependent on costly coal and would clear the city’s air. Of the steel and hydro schemes together Harris writes that neither paid a penny in his lifetime and that he financed all the preliminary investigations.

Dorabji raised the money in India. The Tata Hydro-Electric Supply Company was registered on 7 November 1910 with a nominal capital of Rs 2 crore (Rs 20 million), and Dorabji toured princely states to sell shares. Lord Sydenham laid the foundation stone of the Lonavla dam on 8 February 1911. Lord Willingdon released the current on 11 February 1915 at the receiving station and started the Simplex Mill’s machinery. By Harris’s count the lakes covered nine square miles and the power could drive more than a third of Bombay’s mills. Bhivpuri in 1922 and Bhira in 1927 followed as the next hydro stations, Tata Power’s history says.

Where the record disagrees

The motive for the Taj is the best-known dispute. A popular story says Tata was refused entry to Watson’s Hotel because he was Indian. Harish Bhat, writing in Scroll.in, calls it almost certainly untrue and cites the historians Sharada Dwivedi and Charles Allen, who found it too petty a reason for a man of his standing. Bhat favours Tata’s wish to improve Bombay and attract visitors, which matches the Bilimoria notes in Harris. Cost figures differ too: Bhat gives Rs 26 lakh invested in total, Harris nearly £300,000, and the Tata Group’s profile of Jamsetji Rs 4.21 crore. None of the sources reconciles them.

Smaller discrepancies sit in the company records. The Group’s heritage page gives the Empress Mills’ seed capital as Rs 1.5 lakh, while Harris gives Rs 15 lakh. The Tata Central Archives dates the flotation of the Central India company to 1884 and Harris dates it to 1874; the Group’s timeline gives 1874 for the Nagpur mill.

The firm’s Hong Kong branch, opened in December 1859 with Jamsetji sent out to set up the China house, dealt mainly in cotton and opium, Harris records. Akshi Singh’s review of Mircea Raianu’s history of the Tatas in the London Review of Books notes that the family’s part in the opium trade to China has often been criticised.

What stands today

The Press Information Bureau reported on 4 September 2025 that IISc, as the Institute is known, ranked first among universities in the India Rankings for the tenth year running (2016 to 2025) and first among research institutions for the fifth. In its 2024-25 integrated report Tata Steel lists its India operations at 26.6 million tonnes per annum, against a stated target of 40 million tonnes per annum.