Restoring the Taj is just part of Tata’s challenge

10 January 2009

Richard Orange says rebuilding the terrorist-hit Mumbai hotel will be an easier task than steering Jaguar Land Rover and the steel group Corus through a deep recession

As guests made their way out of the Taj hotel in Mumbai after spending New Year’s Eve in its restaurants, many stopped to study a small memorial plaque erected to commemorate the 12 staff who died protecting guests from terrorists at the end of November. If it has the same dignified simplicity as a British village war memorial, that’s probably no coincidence. Because within the Tata Group — the Taj’s owner, through a subsidiary called Indian Hotels — the ideals of duty, loyalty, courage and grit, which seem to British sensibilities to come from another era, are still very much alive.

‘There was not a single person who did not rise to do their duty,’ Indian Hotels’ patrician deputy chairman R.K. Krishna Kumar told reporters proudly on the eve of the hotel’s reopening on 20 December. Karambir Kang, the hotel’s general manager, continued to direct the hotel’s evacuation even as his own wife and two sons burnt to death in his private suite, Krishna Kumar said. And when, during those dark hours, Kang telephoned his father, a retired Indian army general, for advice and emotional support: ‘His father said, “Do as much as you can to save your family. But don’t leave your post.”’

This year, the Tatas will need every drop of that spirit as their group faces what will be one of the most difficult periods in its 140-year history.

Returning the charred wreckage of the Taj to its former glory will be a monumental task. But it is nothing next to the challenges faced by Tata Motors and Tata Steel, whose $2.3 billion acquisition of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), and £6 billion acquisition of the Anglo-Dutch steel group Corus, have left them exposed to acutely crunch-prone elements of British industry.