Jamsetji Tata

Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata was an Indian industrialist and philanthropist who founded what became the Tata Group, beginning with a trading firm in 1868 that he expanded into textile manufacturing, opening a cotton mill in Nagpur in 1877. He set in motion, though did not live to see completed, three ventures that defined the group's early ambitions: the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Bombay, which opened in 1903; the Tata Iron and Steel Company, which became India's first major steel producer; and the hydroelectric and higher-education projects that led to the Indian Institute of Science. Widely regarded in India as the father of Indian industry, he died in 1904, and his sons and successors carried the group's founding ventures to completion in the years that followed.