19-MAY-1904 :- DEATH OF Jamsetji Tata, Indian businessman, founder of Tata Group.

Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata 

( 3 March 1839 – 19 May 1904) was an Indian pioneer industrialist, who founded the Tata Group, India's biggest conglomerate company. He was born to a Parsi Zoroastrian family in Navsari then part of the princely state of Baroda.

He founded what would later become the Tata Group of companies. Jamsetji Tata is regarded as the legendary "Father of Indian Industry".

"When you have to give the lead in action, in ideas – a lead which does not fit in with the very climate of opinion – that is true courage, physical or mental or spiritual, call it what you like, and it is this type of courage and vision that Jamsetji Tata showed. It is right that we should honour his memory and remember him as one of the big founders of modern India."— Jawahar lal Nehru

Jamsetji worked in his father's company until he was 29. He founded a trading company in 1868 with Rs. 21,000 capital. He bought a bankrupt oil mill at Chinchpokli in 1869 and converted it to a cotton mill, which he renamed Alexandra Mill. He sold the mill two years later for a profit. He set up another cotton mill at Nagpur in 1874, which he christened Empress Mill when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India on 1 January 1877.

He devoted his life to four goals: setting up an iron and steel company, a world-class learning institution, a unique hotel and a hydro-electric plant. Only the hotel became a reality during his lifetime, with the inauguration of the Taj Mahal Hotel at Colaba waterfront in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 3 December 1903 at the cost of 42 million rupees (about 11 billion rupees at 2010 prices). At that time it was the only hotel in India to have electricity.

His successors' work led to the three remaining ideas being achieved:

• Tata Steel (formerly TISCO – Tata Iron and Steel Company Limited) is Asia's first and India's largest steel company. It became world's fifth largest steel company, after it acquired Corus Group producing 28 million tonnes of steel annually.
• Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, the pre-eminent Indian institution for research and education in Science and Engineering.
• Tata Hydroelectric Power Supply Company, renamed Tata Power Company Limited, currently India's largest private electricity company with an installed generation capacity of over 8000MW.