STANDING tall among deal-hungry peers in India, Tata is ready to be compared alongside the global players in many industries, from steel and chemicals to consulting and cars.

The news that Tata Steel, one of the group's main subsidiaries, is considering a bid for Corus, the old British Steel, emphasises that UK industrial giants are increasingly hard to name and that Indian manufacturing is coming of age.

The House of Tata is an imposing structure in Indian business. It is the most highly respected of the established industrial families, and its influence can be seen everywhere — from the Indica cars crawling along congested urban roads to the credit cards lining the wallets of the upwardly mobile middle classes and the sweeping grandeur of the Taj Mahal Hotel, where they swipe them.

With revenues last year of $21.9 billion (£11.6 billion), Tata represents about 2.8 per cent of Indian GDP and has a market capitalisation of $46.9 billion. Although Ratan Tata, as group chairman, is the overseer, he gives a fair degree of autonomy to the trusted lieutenants running the main subsidiaries.

With a shareholder base of more than two million people, the group traditionally has held minority stakes in each of its businesses. This is changing in response to complaints by analysts that the family exercised too much power in relation to its equity.

The response was to increase the family holdings, which has the side benefit of strengthening Tata against potential take- overs. As it is, Tata is doing the taking over.

Tata Steel has a gleaming shop window in India. At Steel Junction in Calcutta, close to its plant in Jamshedpur, customers can browse in the country’s first steel mall for products such as corrugated roofing sheets, pipes, shovels, furniture, kitchenware and gym equipment. The 23,000sq ft outlet is popular among alloy addicts and middle-income families alike.

But the concept is merely a fancy. Tata has ambitions to open a broad window to the world, and it has set out on a serious shopping spree to reach that end. In 2000 the company displayed bravado when its small tea division acquired Tetley, the maker of the traditional English cuppa, for £271 million in the largest cross-border takeover of an international brand by an Indian group.

Since then the list of deals has been growing. In August Tata bettered its record by buying a 30 per cent stake in Glaceau, the US-based vitamin water maker, for $677 million.

Of course, Tata is not alone. Last month Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, named seven Indian mid-cap companies among 300 emerging global challengers to the leading blue-chip companies in the next five to ten years. Among them was Bharat Forge, a Poona-based group that owns the world’s largest metal-forging facility. It asserts that every vehicle in Europe contains at least one part that it has produced.

“If you had asked someone ten years ago about the Indian manufacturing industry, they would have written it off,” Baba Kalyani, the Bharat Forge chairman, said. “Today it is as good, if not better, than anywhere in the world.”

Indian concerns are making an impact far beyond IT. Up the western coast from Bombay, only 200km (125 miles) from the border with Pakistan, the world’s largest oil refinery is coming into being. Reliance Industries, a $33 billion market cap company and another of the family-run conglomerates that dominate the business pages, is halfway through a mammoth project that, once completed, will leapfrog Paraguaná, of Venezuela, and SK Corp, of Korea.

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