The engineering procurement and construction arm of Tata Sons is putting building blocks in place to emerge as a premier infrastructure player in the next decade
Vinayak Pai, MD, Tata Projects, at the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link at Panvel, Mumbai. Image: Neha Mithbawkar for Forbes India
Ninety minutes from central Delhi, the outline of a vast new project is taking shape. Here in the exurb of Jewar, amid 5,000 acres of verdant fields, construction crews have moved in to begin work on what is slated to become India’s largest airport. Scheduled to open in late 2024 with an initial capacity of 12 million passengers, the project has been billed as among country’s finest infrastructure build outs. Concessionaire Zurich International Airport expects it to be among the finest airports globally.
In many ways, the groundbreaking ceremony in June of the Noida International Airport was also a coming out party for Tata Projects, the engineering procurement and construction or EPC arm of Tata Sons. The business, housed as a subsidiary of Tata Power, has been steadily expanding the scope of its activities over the last decade. It has gone from being a sleepy company based in Hyderabad, which worked mainly on projects in the power sector to a leading urban infrastructure player.
It is now working on three of the largest infrastructure projects in the country—the Noida Airport, the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link and the new Parliament building. Industry insiders say that the business received a fresh impetus after Tata Sons’ acrimonious break up with the Shapoorjis. (In some bids, like in the case of the Parliament building, Tata Projects went head-to-head with Shapoorji. Shapoorji did not submit a financial bid).
Vinayak Pai, who took over as managing director in June, says the group that has shown it can innovate with TCS now also wants to show that it can build. “From what I have heard, they (Tata Sons) want us to be the signature organisation in the group that can signify our ability to do complex things,” he says.
Pai knows he has his work cut out, for financial metrics of the business need improvement. Tata Projects, with a Rs45,000 crore order book, has shown it has the ability to get business. But in the year-ended March 2022, the company lost Rs605 crore on a topline of Rs13,758 crore.