Both Tata Motors and Mahindra started only a month apart, have gone on to become one of the world's best-known automobile companies, and now they are giving a much-needed push to the country's auto sector
Mahindra & Mahindra International Harvester machines, August 1961
Image: Mitter Bedi
They perhaps rate among the foremost pivots in India’s corporate annals.
But, at the end of it all, both Tata Motors and Mahindra, which started only a month apart from each other, have gone on to become two of the world’s best-known auto companies, with legacies spread as far as the United Kingdom and South Korea.
Mahindra and Tata Motors were set up in 1945, two years before India became independent from British rule. Mahindra started as Mahindra & Mohammed, and Tata Motors began as Tata Locomotive and Engineering Company. While Mahindra started as steel traders, Tata Motors began as locomotive manufacturers from the famed Tata group, of which the then-chairman was the legendary JRD Tata.
By 1949, Mahindra began importing the legendary Willys Jeep and assembling them out of their factory in Mumbai. Only a few years before that, Mahindra’s partner, Mohammed, had moved to Pakistan after the Partition to become the country’s finance minister, prompting Mahindra to acquire his stake.
Tata Motors, though, started out manufacturing locomotives and boilers, then in high demand, before realising the enormous opportunity in heavy engineering products as the world began to rebuild itself after World War II. In 1954, it struck a partnership with Germany’s Daimler-Benz to manufacture trucks in India. “We derailed the locos and got on the track with trucks. After that, we never looked back,” Sumant Moolgaokar, the famed CEO of Tata Motors, says in Beyond The Last Blue Mountain, written by RM Lala.
(This story appears in the 23 August, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)