Dorabji Tata

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Dorab Tata (August 27, 1859-June 3, 1932), industrialist and philanthropist, and a key figure in the history and development of the Tata industrial empire. Dorabji Tata was knighted in 1910 for his contributions to industry in British India.

Dorab, or Sir Dorabji, as he was later known, was the elder son of Hirabai and Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata. He received his primary education at the Proprietary High School in Bombay (now Mumbai) before travelling to England in 1875, where he was privately tutored. He entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1879, where he remained for two years before returning to Bombay in 1879. He continued his studies at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, where he obtained a degree in 1882.

Upon graduating, Dorab worked for two years as a journalist at the Bombay Gazette. In 1884, he joined the cotton business division of his father's firm. He was first sent to Pondicherry, then a French colony, in order to determine whether a cotton mill might be profitable there. Thereafter, he was sent to Nagpur, in order to learn the cotton trade at the Empress Mills which had been founded by his father in 1877.

He was then sent to Mysore State, where he was advised to call on Dr. H. J. Bhabha, the first Indian Inspector-General of Education. Dorab did so, where he met Bhabha's daughter Meherbai, who he married in 1897.

Dorabji was intimately involved in the fulfilment of his father's ideas of a modern iron and steel industry, and agreed to the necessity for hydroelectric electricity to power the industry. Dorab is credited with the establishment of the Tata Steel and Tata Power companies, which are the core of the present-day Tata Group. Dorabji is known to have personally accompanied the mineralogists who were searching for iron fields, and it is said that his presence encouraged the researchers to look in areas that would otherwise have been neglected. Under Dorabji's management, the business that had once included three cotton mills and the Taj Hotel Bombay grew to include India's largest private sector steel company, three electric companies and one of India’s leading insurance companies.

Dorabji was extremely fond of sports, and was a pioneer in the Indian Olympic movement. As President of the Indian Olympic Association, he financed the Indian contingent to the Paris Olympics in 1924.

Meherbai Tata died of leukaemia in 1931 at the age of 52. Shortly after her death, Dorabji established the Lady Tata Memorial Trust to advance the study into diseases of the blood. On March 11, 1932, one year after Meherbai's death and shortly before his own, he established a trust fund which was to be used "without any distinction of place, nationality or creed," for the advancement of learning and research, disaster relief, and other philanthropic purposes. That trust is today known as the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. Dorabji additionally provided the seed money to fund the setting up of India's premier scientific and engineering research institution, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Dorabji died in Bad Kissingen, Germany on June 3, 1932, at the age of 73. He is buried alongside his wife Meherbai in Brookwood Cemetery, England. They had no children.