Political considerations caused a six-year delay in commissioning
Tata Power’s expansion plans
Excerpts from Shashank Shah’s The Tata Group: From Torchbearers to Trailblazers. Reproduced with permission from Penguin Random House India.
Here is an example of Tata Power’s frustrating yet committed efforts to expand capacity, and the Byzantine maze of political landmines it had to negotiate. In the mid-1950s, J. R. D. Tata, along with Sir Homi Mody, then director-in-charge of the Tata Electric Companies (TEC, now Tata Power) went to meet Morarji Desai, then chief minister of Bombay state (now divided into Maharashtra and Gujarat). JRD submitted to Desai the Tatas’ projection on power shortage in the coming years. "No there will......