- In its 70th year, Tata’s flagship general management programme seems to be struggling to keep pace with the group’s growing leadership demands
- What benefits TAS officers—higher pay, cross-company mobility, no function-based restrictions—is exactly what companies struggle to accommodate
- Plus, without Ratan Tata’s backing, many TAS officers today struggle to wield the same level of influence as their predecessors did
- The programme is in need of a revamp, so that its prestige can match the crucial role it once played within the Tata group
Among the many things that the chairmanship feud at Tata Sons is surfacing, contentious succession planning is the most glaring.
In September, Tata Sons incumbent chairman N Chandrasekaran was reappointed, with Tata Trusts chairman Noel Tata being the sole opposer. This followed months of internal tensionsFortune IndiaNoel Tata vs Chandrasekaran: The war unfolding at Tata. Now Tata Trusts—a 66% shareholder of Tata Sons—has labelled the reappointment unlawful, with the group’s apex leadership stuck in a stalemate.
Ironically, this has coincided with the 70th anniversary of Tata Administrative Services (TAS), the group’s general-management programme inspired by the Indian Administrative Services to internally groom future leaders of the Tata group. TAS was meant to bridge succession gaps just like these by investing in India’s “finest brains”, including people such as Tata Son’s Harish Bhat and Titan’s Ajoy Chawla.
But over the years, TAS’s relevance—and place in the group—has diminished.
As the Tata group has expanded into semiconductors, electronics, EVs, and e-commerce, TAS has been unable to keep pace with the expertise this demands. Instead, it has been reduced to one of several entry points into the group, at times finding it difficult to get group companies to return its calls. For instance, earlier this year when a TAS officer wanted to explore openings at Air India, he claimed the group company’s HR completely ignored TAS’s enquiries.
Other officers have gotten frustrated with the plodding pace of work at the conglomerate.
An ex-Titan officer recalled when he was trying to list lifestyle brand Fastrack on Flipkart in the early 2010s. “The leaders in the company had dismissed e-commerce as a fad. By the time we got the 20 sign-offs needed, competitors like Casio and Fossil had been dominating sales for a year,” he said.
Things like this have professional consequences. When an ex-TAS officer from the 2021 batch applied for a position at Walmart, he lost out to a candidate from Amazon. “They’ll always prefer Amazon over Tata Cliq or Bigbasket, as the latter are not market leaders,” he said.
No wonder officers leave—they want to avoid being redundant.
This is worlds apart from TAS officers’ experience in the 80s and 90s.
Credits
TAS was Tata’s leadership factory. Now it’s a glorified recruitment agency
Debanjali Biswas
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