Mutiny in the Tata boardroom

People walking past the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, India. The Tata Group owns many businesses such as the Taj Hotels. — Shubhadeep Mukherjee/The New York Times

WHO actually controls India’s biggest company?

A bitter power struggle over the Tata Group, a 158-year-old conglomerate with more than a million employees worldwide and US$180bil in annual revenue, has become a test of who calls the shots in Indian capitalism: owners, professional managers or the government.

The fight pits the family-led charitable trusts that own two-thirds of Tata Sons, the group’s holding company, against the powerful chair who runs its businesses.

India’s government has emerged as a wild card, pressing Tata Sons to list on the stock market – a move that could permanently reshape its ownership and weaken the founding family’s control.

The conflict simmered for at least a year before bursting into the open.

In August, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, one of India’s most celebrated CEOs, stunned the business world by announ­cing he would not seek another five-year term as chair. He cited opposition from one board member to his staying beyond February.

That “absence of unanimous support” would hurt the company when “many strategic projects” are under “critical stage­s of execution,” he wrote in a letter at the time.

“Clarity on leadership is important for employees, investors, partners and other stakeholders.”

A month later, he reversed course. At a Sept 17 meeting, a majority of the board voted to reappoint him.

Noel Tata, a board member and head of the Tata Trusts, a group of public charities that owns 66% of Tata Sons, had cast the sole dissenting vote.

Noel called the vote to reappoint Chandrasekaran “illegal” because it had bypassed his veto.

Later that day, he wrote that Chandra­sekaran had “freely” chosen to resign and that it was time to “turn the page”.

Since then, his office has filed dozens of legal motions preparing to challenge the vote.

The dispute could reverberate across Indian businesses, where founding families retain control of many of the largest companies, even when professional manager­­s run the day-to-day operations.

Amit Tandon, founder of the Mumbai, India-based Institutional Investor Advi­sory Services, said he could not recall any other board mutiny against a control­ling shareholder in India.

About two-thirds of the country’s biggest companies are family-owned, he said.

“Business families will see the dispute as a warning that ownership alone does not guarantee control,” he added.

India’s business dynasties don’t want their hired managers wresting control of companies that families spent generations building.

Chandrasekaran’s supporters see a different threat. They argue that the Tata Group is too important to India to be governed by antiquated ownership arrangements or the whims of a founding family.

Vijay Singh, a former secretary of defence who served on the Tata Sons board and remains a trustee of some of the seven charities that own it, draws a clear distinction between ownership and management.

The trustees “may be owners, but they’re not entitled to run the companies,” said Vijay, who supports Chandrasekaran.

“The charities and the business were meant to be unconnected.”

The stakes for this boardroom battle are enormous because Tata is woven into almost every facet of Indian life.

Arrive in Mumbai on a Tata-owned airline, and you can ride in a Tata-made taxi to a Tata hotel, passing billboards for Tata real estate or Tata life insurance along the way.

The tea in your room may be Tata’s. So might your watch or jewellery. If you are reading this on a new iPhone, there is a good chance that it was assembled in India by Tata.

Few countries have a corporate institution quite like it.

Tata is trusted, even loved, not just for its products but for its philanthropy.

The Tata Trusts support cancer hospi­tals, scientific research, nutrition program­mes and the performing arts.

Some of the charities predate India’s independence.

Now, the two pillars of Tata – its businesses and its charities – are at war.

From offices high in Mumbai’s World Trade Centre, Noel, a descendant of the founder, Jamsetji Tata, presides over the trusts.

They own two-thirds of Tata Sons, which holds substantial stakes in the group companies listed on stock exchan­ges, as well as its private businesses and real estate, and controls the corporate brand.

About 2km away, Chandrasekaran and his management team run the empire from Bombay House, the elegant headquarters built in 1924 and renovated after he took over in 2017.

There, in fourth-floor boardrooms, his allies organise their defence against what they see as Noel’s overbearing inter­ference.

The legal entanglement reflects a cong­lo­merate with a complicated history stret­ching back to the 19th century.

But this is more than a feud between two men.

At the centre of the struggle is a govern­ment push to force Tata Sons onto the stock market, turning a governance dispute into an existential fight over ownership.

In 2022, the Reserve Bank of India intro­duced rules that threatened to force Tata Sons to list on the stock market.

Going public would require the holding company to sell 25% of its equity to outside investors, diluting existing share­holders.

The central bank’s rationale was India’s financial stability.

Regulators argued that Tata Sons was so deeply enmeshed in the country’s financial system that its debt could have made it “too big to fail” – meaning its collapse might threaten the banking system.

They said wider ownership and disclosure requirements for public companies would reduce the risk.

Initially, Noel and Chandrasekaran opposed a forced listing.

In 2024, the group paid off all of its debt, hoping to satisfy the regulator’s demands without surrendering its private status.

But this June, the central bank said debt levels were irrelevant.

Any organisation with assets exceeding one trillion rupees, or about US$10.3bil, the bank declared, had to be listed, a threshold well below Tata Sons’ size.

Forcing a private company to sell shares to the public as protection against a hypo­thetical financial crisis would be an extra­ordinary intervention, with few compa­ra­ble precedents.

By the Sept 17 meeting, with most of the board behind him, Chandrasekaran decided that Tata Sons should list.

Man­agement and the government were now aligned.

Noel and the trusts are determined to keep it private. — ©2026 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times