Remembering Sumant Moolgaokar who kickstarted Tata Motors successful journey

The Tata Sumo is named after Sumant Moolgaokar.

Last week, Tata Motors’s market cap briefly crossed that of Maruti Suzuki. In the process, it became the country’s most valuable automobile company, an achievement that coincides happily with the 118th birth anniversary this month of Sumant Moolgaokar, the man who was in the driver’s seat through its first few decades in business.

Plucked out of the group’s cement business by that peerless talent spotter and mentor JRD Tata, Moolgaokar grew Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (Telco), as it was called till 2003, from its beginnings as a manufacturer of boilers and engineering products to a leader in heavy vehicles including trucks and buses over the course of the four decades that he headed it. In a bit of delicious irony, he served as non-executive chairman of rival Maruti too when it was set up in the 1980s.

The story goes that the young engineer from the City and Guilds (Imperial College), London was egged on by JRD Tata to take on the bigger challenge when he was working at ACC. Telco had been incorporated on September 1, 1945, to produce locomotives and boilers. But at the end of World War II, there was an opportunity to move into other, more lucrative product segments. But for that it needed to put the right people in the right place. According to Russi M. Lala’s biography Beyond The Last Blue Mountain, JRD Tata, reached out to Moolgaokar who was then working with ACC with the exhortation: “How long are you going to make the glue that sticks the bricks together?” He also requested ACC chairman Sir Homi Mody to release Moolgaokar, a request that Mody declined saying, “We need Moolgaokar.” JRD of course was not one to take “No” for an answer and he kept at it until Mody finally relented.

In 1949, Moolgaokar joined Telco as director-in-charge and in 1954, the company signed a partnership agreement with Daimler-Benz to manufacture trucks in the country. The German company’s zeal for perfection matched his own and he instilled in the workforce the same pursuit of excellence saying: “Do not accept second-rate work; expect the best, ask for it, pursue it relentlessly and you will get it.” It was a simple enough mantra but one that his people understood and embraced.

Moolgaokar combined rare man management skills with a deep connection with the customers, the truck drivers, who came to depend on the company’s trucks for their long and arduous journeys across the country whose highways still hadn't been blessed by the Nitin Gadkari touch. An oft quoted story is about how he would sometimes skip lunch in the office cafeteria in Jamshedpur leading to speculation that he had gone for a fancy meal with some of the company’s dealers. To catch him in the act some of his colleagues decided to follow him one afternoon. Imagine their surprise when they found the CEO’s car parked at a roadside dhaba while the man sat eating and talking to truck drivers to understand any problems they may have had with Tata trucks.

In an era when the other passenger car makers had little idea of the world of harried drivers who struggled with their Ambassadors and Fiats that often broke down mid-journey, this was a perfect example of why Telco became one of the most trusted brands in the country.

In his book The Learning Factory: How the Leaders of Tata Became Nation Builders, Arun Maira, who spent 25 years in the Tata group before going on to head Boston Consulting Group, writes about how Moolgaokar always wanted Telco to be a learning organisation with the ability to rapidly learn to do things it was not able to do before. He cites the example of how Telco learnt to make trucks and buses to Mercedes’s standards and then to export them to competitive markets. The experience gained allowed the company to design and make a light commercial vehicle (LCV) that successfully took on the challenge of the Japanese when they entered the Indian LCV market.

In fact, it was Moolgaokar’s dream for Telco to develop a passenger car, something that Ratan Tata acknowledged in a November 1998 interview with Time magazine where he said “When I joined Telco in 1986, the then chairman Sumant Moolgaokar wanted to develop a passenger car.”

In honour of the man who showed them the route by taking it himself, in 1994 Tata Motors named its SUV Tata Sumo with the “SU” standing for Sumant and “MO” after Moolgaonkar. It was an apt tribute to one of India’s finest corporate leaders.