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THE INAUGURATION

RN TATA
Chairman, Tata Sons Limited

Excerpts from his speech at the inauguration of the
Tata Central Archives in Pune on February 13, 2001.

think so often we lose our heritage and our history in
time. The Archives in my view are important to the Tata group

I articular not because we wish to promote or propagate
in p
what our predecessors or ancestors did. But that buried in this

material that I hope we can retrieve and will retrieve and continue
to retrieve and effectively preserve, is really the story of the early

industrialisation of India — spanning steel and spanning power and
the vision of a man who came from a trading family, but had the

vision of industrialising India and (was) a great patriot.

And I think then followed, in the following years, the growth and
the vision of JRD Tata. What he brought to the Tata group and the

way he saw the industrialisation of India and perhaps to a great
extent the activity he was unable to fulfil, and which I know that in

the last 20-30 years of his tenure, he suffered great frustration and
the fact that, what he would have liked to do, and the way that he

would have liked to see India develop, it did not.

I am sure the Archives won’t capture that frustration, or the
data that we have will not capture that frustration, but I think it

certainly will capture what he did as a patriot, what he did as an
Indian, how he saw India. I think his early work is presumably,

the precursor to the Planning Commission — The Bombay Plan,

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