Hyderabad: Nearly 14 years back, when Ratan Tata in his capacity as the Tata Group chairman visited Hyderabad to inaugurate the manufacturing facility of Tata Advanced Systems, he paid a rare tribute to the city.
“When I visited Hyderabad in the 1980s on behalf of Nelco, which used to sell television sets, it was a sleepy town. Now, when I came out of the airport and passed through the city, I realised how much it grew in the last 30 years,” Tata said in the presence of K. Rosaiah, then chief minister of the united Andhra Pradesh.
The Tata Group has a wide business presence in Hyderabad, but Tata Advanced Systems was the only Tata Group entity, which was headquartered in here. As a result, Tata’s visits to Hyderabad were few and far between.
Though he had visited Hyderabad in April 2006 for the fifth Graduation Day of the Indian School of Business (IBS) on the invitation of Rajat Gupta, the then chairman of ISB Governing Board, the city infrastructure was not as developed as it was in 2010.
The Rajiv Gandhi Hyderabad International Airport (RGIA) started operations in March 2008, while the Gachibowli-Shamshabad stretch of the Outer Ring Road was thrown open for public use in November 2008.
After November 7, 2010, Tata’s love for Hyderabad grew. He was in the city for the inauguration of Taj Falaknuma, the Taj Group’s fourth palace hotel after three in Rajasthan by 2010.
Tata was in Hyderabad to attend the inauguration of the Schulich School of Business & GMR School of Business in RGIA premises in September 2014, marking his first visit to the newly-created state of Telangana. He next visited the city in November 2015 to inaugurate the T-Hub.
Ratan Tata, who was very forthright in claiming the Tata group’s credentials as industrialists, was effusive in his praise for T-Hub and said incubators like T-Hub would be the nucleus of the bigger technological transformation in India.
Explaining that entrepreneurship was deeply rooted among Indians for several centuries, Tata had said that he grew up in an environment where if you had an idea, your boss or the manager would not be willing to listen to that and would politely say that one has to gain experience on a floor shop before coming up with ideas.
A year later in 2016, he took over as the interim chairman of Tata Sons after Cyrus Mistry was voted out of the post. However, advanced age and other corporate commitments kept Ratan Tata away from Hyderabad.
