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Sir Ratan Tata

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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"SIR RATAN TATA (1871-1918), Parsee financier and philanthropist, was born at Bombay Jan. 20 1871, the son of the famous Parsee merchant Jamsetji Nasarwanji Tata ( see 26.448). He was educated at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, and afterwards entered his father's firm. On the death of the elder Tata in 1904, Ratan Tata and his brother Dorabji Jamsetji Tata (b. 1859) 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. An Indian institute of scientific and medical research was founded at Mysore in 1905, and in 1912 the Tata Iron and Steel Co. began work at Sachi, in the Central Provinces, with marked success. The most important of the Tata enterprises, however, was the storing of the water-power of the Western Ghats (1915), which provided the city of Bombay with an enormous amount of electrical power, and hence vastly increased the productive capacity of the Bombay industries. Sir Ratan Tata, who was knighted in 1916, did not confine his benefactions to India. In England, where he had a permanent residence at York House, Twickenham, he founded (1912) the Ratan Tata department of social science and administration at the London School of Economics, and in 1912 established a Ratan Tata fund at the university of London for studying the conditions of the poorer classes. He died at St. Ives, Cornwall, Sept. 5 1918.