Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Churn at Tata Motors

Sometimes you have to thank your bosses for having insight. Recently when Tata Motors announced that Ravi Kant had become their MD, one of my bosses told me that this would make Dr V Sumantran's tenure at the company a bit 'tenuous'. And three weeks later, he has been proved right as Sumantran put in his papers today. Sumantran, a former General Motors engineer was brought in especially by Mister T to work on the Indica project. Sumantran led Tata's development that developed the Indica, Indigo, Indigo Marina as well as the new Common-Rail Direct Injection 'Dicor' engine. At the launch of the Safari Dicor he said how hard the company had worked to develop this new engine. Indeed, Tata Motors was the first car company to develop their own CRD engine indegenously. Yet, while the man was a accomplished engineer, many journo's (including myself) often found him arrogant and slightly megalomaniac, but that is hardly a fault in him alone. But I'm sure the man must've been pissed off when Kant and not him was made MD when Tata Motors acquired their first MD in 11 years. Even though Kant was many years his senior. I will like to see how the papers play this up tomorrow.
So, Mister T will have to find someone else to develop 'The son of Indica', because that car would require a lot of development if it is to appeal to international markets. Wow, I just love boardroom politics.
(pic from this article)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

hehehehe.. well, the auto correspondent at de place i work said de same thing! clairvoyants, the two of u? ;-)

PS: seijos is a very cool place.
PPS": toby stephens was MUCH better dan Aamir.

Anonymous said...

actually sumantran didn't work on Indica much ... though he did to an extent work on developing the V2 which eventually turned the business around ...
also, with Tata Magna project dropped (the luxury sedan), he doesn't have too much of a role to play ...
the only stuff you will see from the Telco stable is variants from the Indica platform and the new UV platform they are developing ...

more importantly, the politics between Gopal, RK, Sumantran and Kadle is apparently intolerable for most employees ...

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
K said...

whoa....

K said...

Sorry, Bonatellis, had to delete one because its a dead giveaway.

Anonymous said...

yeah, that's ok .. u did right.

i didnt think of it that way.