R. M. Lala

A substantial part of the profits of Tata Sons, the parent company of the Tata Group, goes to the Tata trusts, which in turn have established national institutions of research and learning, and financed a host of projects. R. M. Lala profiles the personalities behind some of these trusts

Lady Meherbai Tata, wife of Sir Dorabji Tata and an accomplished pianist and tennis player, was the founder of the Bombay Presidency Women’s Council. More than 60 years ago she called for greater participation of women in legislatures, a movement that has gained momentum recently. Owner of the ‘Jubilee Diamond’, one of the largest diamonds in the world (twice the size of the Kohinoor), Lady Meherbai could move with royalty yet keep the common touch.

Back in the 1920s, when she heard that families in the riot-affected areas of Byculla in Mumbai were starving, Lady Meherbai organised a group of women to sell vegetables in Byculla market. She went with her all-women team to the British police commissioner for permission. The commissioner told the ladies that it would not be "graceful" for them to sell vegetables, and suggested they may like to "give it away". Lady Meherbai’s reply was terse: "We have come here to be useful, not graceful."

In 1930, at the age of 50, Lady Meherbai was struck with leukaemia. She succumbed to the disease a year later in Wales. Within a year of her demise, Sir Dorabji started two trusts in his wife’s memory.

Two visionary ventures
The first, the Lady Meherbai D.Tata Education Trust, connecting with Lady Meherbai’s love for social work, enables young women to go abroad and specialise in social work. The second, and more important one, the Lady Tata Memorial Trust (LTMT), sponsors international research into leukaemia and the alleviation of human suffering.

The LTMT is mandated to spend four-fifths of its income on international research, and an international committee of experts in London carefully selects the researchers. In 1996-97 the Trust spent £200,000 for research into the subject by nine scientists from four countries. Dr David Galton, the ‘father of leukaemia research’ and former chairman of the Trust’s international committee, summed up the LTMT’s work in a speech at the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1990 by saying that some of the research that qualified for the Nobel and other prizes was initially conducted by LTMT research scholars at early stages of their careers.

In March 1932, Sir Dorabji set up a trust in his own name, the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, to which he bequeathed his entire fortune. This comprised Rs 1 crore (including the Jubilee Diamond), all his shares and even his pearl-studded tie pins and cuff links.

He followed the lead of his brother, Sir Ratan Tata, by donating his magnificent art collection to the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai. Sir Ratan had an unparalleled collection of art, especially of Chinese jade. The collection formed the most important single collection at the Prince of Wales Museum when it opened.

At a meeting with the then governor of Bombay, Sir Dorabji discussed his desire to do something for cancer victims in India. The governor suggested that he start a radium wing at the Bombay Hospital. As the subject was new, Sir Dorabji planned to explore the possibility by looking at similar examples in Europe. He also planned to visit his wife’s grave. On the way, while in Germany, he passed away. It had been a year since Lady Meherbai had died. Sir Dorabji was buried next to his wife at the Brookwood Cemetery outside London.

Trustees take it forward
It was fortunate that the two main projects Sir Dorabji’s trustees undertook was to launch, in 1936, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, reflecting Lady Meherbai’s interest in social work, and — instead of a radium wing — the Tata Memorial Hospital for Cancer in 1941, a full-scale hospital with facilities for research and education.

In the early 1940s, Dr Homi Bhabha impressed upon J. R. D. Tata the importance of fundamental research if India was to progress. Dr Bhabha was particularly keen to harness atomic energy to produce electric power. In August 1945, three months before the world woke up to Hiroshima and the awesome power of the atom, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) was established by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust with the cooperation of the Indian government and the government of Bombay.

A decade later, Dr Bhabha took with him about 40 scientists from the TIFR for the atomic energy programme at Trombay. Dr Bhabha called the TIFR "the cradle of India’s atomic energy programme".

In 1966 the Tata trustees heard the proposal of a then junior trustee, Mr Jamshed Bhabha, to start the National Centre for the Performing Arts. The initial grant of Rs 40 lakh, then a substantial figure, went into the sea — literally. That was what it took to reclaim the land the from the sea (eight acres in all) that today houses not only the Tata Theatre and the Jamshed Bhabha Hall, the finest theatres in India, but also an experimental theatre, an art gallery, a photographic gallery and an entire arts complex.

Some time after he resigned as finance minister of India in the early 1950s, Dr John Mathai became chairman of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. In 1952 Dr Mathai launched the Trust into an integrated rural programme in the drought-affected area of the Mann region in Maharashtra. It was one of the first private initiatives of its kind.

Under Dr Mathai, with the cooperation of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind and the National Association for the Blind, the Trust started India’s first programme to impart agricultural training to the rural blind. The setting, at Phansa, not far from Daman, was beautiful: 240 acres of land with groves of coconut, sapota and mango trees.

Dr Mathai also got the Trust to start, with the cooperation of the United Nations, the Institute of Demographic Research, now called the International Institute of Population Studies, at Chembur in suburban Mumbai. In 1986, at the initiative of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, the Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy was established with H. T. Parikh as its first chairman.

In his last years J. R. D. Tata — a trustee of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust from its inception in 1932 up to his death in 1993 — was very keen on two subjects: elevation of women in India and protection of the environment. Keeping this in mind, the Trust recently made a substantial donation to the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation for a J. R. D. Tata Centre for Ecotechnology. It made a further grant, to the Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions, for the preservation of medicinal plants in Maharashtra. It also sanctioned a substantial grant for a watershed programme in Maharashtra.

The ultimate test of philanthropy is what happens in the lives of the people. In the last three years of his life J. R. D. Tata took great interest in the J. R. D. and Thelma Tata Trust, to which he gave a substantial part of the sale proceeds of his flat at Peddar Road, Mumbai. J. R. D. wanted it to work for the elevation, as he wrote, of "disadvantaged women and children in their care."

He selected, apart from his male colleagues, three distinguished women as trustees: Magsaysay award winner Dr Banoobai Coyaji, Dr Armaity Desai, who went on to become the chairperson of the University Grants Commission, and Dr Suma Chitnis, then vice-chancellor of the S.N.D.T. University. Much earlier, in 1944, when he was only 40 years old, J. R. D. had started the J. R. D. Tata Trust.

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