Independence Day: How the Tatas struck back at the British empire

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

“Do you mean to say that Tatas propose to make steel rails to British specifications? Why, I will undertake to eat every pound of steel rail they succeed in making.” This was a retort by Sir Frederick Upcott, chief commissioner of Indian Railways in the early 1900s, when Dorabji Tata, son of Sir Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, announced plans to make steel in India. Upcott believed that Indians were good enough to make steel like the British wanted. Only British Steel supplied the steel good enough for making rails.A century of determinationIn October 2006, business magnate Ratan Tata put pen to paper as Tata Steel completed the most prominent foreign takeover by an Indian company as it acquired European steel giant Corus Group.

He called it a «moment of fulfilment for India». Erstwhile British Steel Corporation, a government-owned coalition of 14 major steel producers in Britain, was privatised in the 1980s. British Steel merged with Koninklijke Hoogovens in 1999 to form Corus, only to be eventually acquired by the Tata Group in a $14-billion deal in 2007, making it the fifth biggest steel producer in the world at the time.

The history had come full circle from Upcott's quip to the Tatas buying the company which had its origin in British Steel. Tata's took nearly a century to strike back at the empire. «When we launched the bid for Corus, many thought it was an audacious move, because an Indian company taking over an European company much larger in size has not happened before,» Ratan Tata said when the deal to acquire Corus went through.