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The Rediff Business Special / Tribute / Darbari Seth

A Michelangelo in Industry

By Fredie A Mehta

In a life-time of nearly sixty years devoted to Indian industry and to the Tatas, there are few areas that Darbari Seth touched but did not adorn. He was by all accounts an achiever of the highest order; he was, in modern parlance, a turnaround artist; he was a creator of several institutes; he was an entrepreneur par excellence; and not least, he was a philanthropist whose donations helped a number of life-giving and life-sustaining institutions not only to survive but to grow.

ALSO SEE Darbari Seth passes away in London Vajpayee joins India Inc in paying tributes

Darbari, as we knew him, came on the scene in Tata Chemicals and within a year transformed its balance-sheets. Darbari came on the scene of Tata Oil Mills or TOMCO when it was incurring substantial losses, and within a year, he turned it into a substantial profit-making company.

A turnaround artist who enriched shareholders' wealth

Again, he came to Tata Tea at a time when the tea industry was passing through a cyclically downward trend, and converted Tata Finlay with its history of losses of 20 years, into a record profit. Since we are reminded times out of number that the creation of shareholders' wealth is the supreme goal of corporate activity (Darbari Seth would never have accepted that), yet let it be put on record that within a matter of less than ten years, Darbari enriched the shareholders of Tata Tea by over Rs 40 billion of market capitalisation. Darbari was also a person consumed by crusading fervour: amongst several of his crusades was one for the preservation of energy and the environment wherefrom was born the now all-India famous Tata Energy Research Institute or TERI.

Social activist who lived up to prophecies

May I indulge in a short autobiographical recall? In 1957, a young recruit to the newly-founded Tata Administrative Service was sent to Mithapur for his training course in Tata Chemicals. The trainee wrote to his friend in Bombay in words, which were to become prophetic. "There are many persons and many things to admire in Mithapur, but the one person who stands out as outstanding is Darbari Seth. He is a dynamo of energy, is brimful of ideas and obviously is a great motivator of his friends and colleagues. He certainly will be a great figure in Tata Chemicals in the first instance, and in the Tata Organisation, thereafter." Incidentally, I was the trainee concerned.

Darbari was almost becoming somewhat of a legend in the city of Mithapur, but it was the intuitive selection by Colonel Leslie Sawhney that gave Darbari the biggest break-through in his life. Thereafter, Darbari had a bonded relationship with JRD Tata, who, as was his wont, always gave the fullest to any Tata executive that showed drive, courage and innovation.

Darbari, when he came to 'power' so to say in Mithapur, not only transformed the balance-sheet of Tata Chemicals, but converted a city known for its water shortage, into a city awashed with water. When the rains shied away from Mithapur, creating an acute water shortage, Darbari, within a matter of three weeks, through feat of chemical engineering, liberated Mithapur from the curse of water shortage forever. Anyone who knew Darbari, also knew that nothing activated and motivated him more than challenges that came his way -- and there were plenty that did face him in his life.

A visionary who moved Indira Gandhi to tears

Then came the great day for Darbari. India was threatened in the mid-1960s with conditions approximating to a famine; indeed, the Pollock Bros had in their famous (notorious?) book Famine 1975 predicted that India was destined to be "the bell-wether" of a Malthusian disaster. On the one side were the initial beginnings of the Green Revolution; on the other, Darbari and his colleagues at Mithapur planned to give India the biggest fertilizer plant in the world. When Indira Gandhi visited Mithapur and heard Darbari's explosion (and dear Lord, was not Darbari a fantastic expositor!), Gandhi was swept off her feet and shed a tear at the prospects that this great fertilizer factory would open out for India.

Alas, it was not to be. Darbari's fertilizer project, so lovingly backed by JRD Tata and all his colleagues, was trapped in the ideological imbroglio of the "concentration of economic power". How can we allow the Tatas to build for India the greatest fertilizer factory, when in the first place, it will add Rs 2.07 billion to their (mythological) "concentration of economic power"? Caught in this ideological blizzard, Darbari had his moment of bitterness which culminated in his first heart attack.

But now he was to devise a strategy which today would be known as "think global, act local". Here began a chapter of Darbari's life which has not found a legitimate place in the tributes paid to him.

Going places

Darbari began with Argentina, and then in a magnificent leap of innovativeness, presented to the Argentine government a soda-ash plant which would simultaneously release cement and power to the backward area of Patagonia. For various reasons, political no less than economic, this scheme did not go through.

Then came Turkey in which again Darbari made a valiant effort (I was witness to it) but this time things went wrong because the demands of the Turkish party were a little off-colour.

One more try, and again I was involved. In a chance meeting with President Marcos, I convinced him that what the Philippines needed was a magnificent soda-ash plant. The Philippines had ample salt resources, the country (thanks to San Miguel beer alone!) had all the demand. On the other side, Tata Chemicals, under the brainstorming leadership of Darbari Seth, could design, fabricate and operate the most magnificent soda-ash plant that the Philippines could boast of. Unfortunately, certain vested interests in the Philippines saw to it that this dream did not materialise.

What was to click in a big way was when Darbari, after becoming the vice-chairman of TOMCO in 1973, re-engineered the Malaysian palm oil project. His dream was to achieve together with his Danish partners, the biggest palm oil refinery plant in the world. For years, this was a showpiece of what the Tatas could do abroad, but here again, events much later were to disrupt this happy achievement.

All this will show that the Tatas had very early in the day a clear idea of the death blows that the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (Prevention) Act would deal to the Tata organisation, and while one part of the strategy was to convert the Managing Agency into a Consulting Organisation, the other part of the strategy was to find investments in foreign countries.

A corporate chief turns a national hero

By the end of the 1970s, Darbari had become an all-India figure, known for his dynamism, his innovativeness, his command over various disciplines, and not least, of his dedication to the goals of philanthropy so cherished by both the founder and then by JRD Tata, and now happily continued by Ratan Tata.

Typical of Darbari was his fantastic courage in taking up Tata Finlay in the early '80s. The curtains were down and he more than anybody else laid the foundation of its prosperity by a series of bold strokes in the very area in which he was often pronounced very weak, namely, the area of marketing.

But Darbari as an industrialist par excellence, knew one thing; Tatas must build up a strong agricultural base for India. Already, Darbari having become the chairman of Rallis in 1978, was designing new strategies for the Tatas; Tata Tea was now a Tata show; what now remained was to give India a most sophisticated, technologically state-of-the-art factory. This dream came true with the factory in Babrala which was inaugurated by Rajiv Gandhi.

Three monuments, two loves

Mithapur, Munnar, Babrala -- all stand monuments to the genius of Darbari Seth. He was truly a renaissance man with his command over a number of different disciplines. In all that he aimed, and in all that he achieved, there were a number of colleagues (devotees!) who stood by him to translate his dreams, of which he had many, into realities.

But one thing we can say for sure. There were two persons in his life whom he respected, loved and admired. One was, of course, J R D Tata with whom his bond of affection, love and loyalty had extended for a period of more than 30 years. The other was, of course, his wife Brij, who stood like a pillar in all the storms and stresses through which Darbari went and who kept alive the fire of religion in Darbari's heart.

The ultimate Parsee and the perfect secularist

For the final thing to say about Darbari is -- he was a great patriot of India, he was a devout Hindu, he was an ardent Sikh, he loved the best of Islam and he was (as I once told him) the ultimate Parsee. Such was his contribution to secularism that it makes us proud that our country can produce a person gifted with so many qualities not only of the head but of the heart.

Fredie A Mehta, director, Tata Sons Limited, is a long-time friend and associate of Darbari Seth

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