To understand why Ratan Tata, the urbane head of the sprawling Tata group of companies, will be hoping that his family firm can still prevail in the battle for what remains of the British steel industry, you just have to talk to Jagat Narayan Singh.

Mr Singh worked for Tata Steel at its home in Jamshedpur, eastern India, for 40 years. He was the third generation of his family to be employed at the steel works and now his son Lalit also works for the company; he fully expects his grandsons to do the same. “I cannot put into words what I feel about this company,” he says, sitting, surrounded by his family, in his Tata Steel bungalow. Lalit chips in: “I want to serve with loyalty the same company as my father and grandfather. This company respects its employees.”

As Mr Tata weighs whether to raise his bid, he will be trying to calculate if Tata’s singular image as a company that bends over backwards to look after its workers and redistributes much of its profits into philanthropic works, could help to persuade Corus’s shareholders and leadership to stick with the Indian behemoth rather than the Brazilians, who have raised the stakes.

The Singhs live in a five-bedroom bungalow. It is cramped living, with the patriarch and his wife, two of his sons, including Lalit, and their wives and three grandchildren all under the same roof. But the family pay a nominal rent of just under £2 a month to rent the place. Mr Singh Sr, now retired at 69, could not be happier. “I have my family, my dog and my cow all living in this house,” he beams. For the record: the cow and its calf are outside in the tiny yard.

The Tata Steel benefits system doesn’t end with subsidised housing. In Jamshedpur, a town carved out of the jungle for the sole purpose of producing steel, they like to joke that Tata Steel takes care of everything “from womb to tomb”. Babies are born in the Tata-built-and-funded hospital, and for Tata employees healthcare is free. When the hospital can no longer do anything for you, the Tata-run cemetery will take care of things. Around half the children go to Tata-built schools, then work for the company and enjoy highly subsidised Tatasupplied electricity and free water. Tata controls and purifies the water, with the result that Jamshedpur is one of the very few places in India where it is claimed you can drink the tap water. In parts of Greater Jamshedur not controlled by Tata Steel there are slums, intermittent power and foul water. Tata Steel even has a hotline to call if a snake drops by your place and declines to leave.

B. Muthuraman, the managing director of Tata Steel, says that if Tata Steel succeeds in merging with Corus, British executives will certainly work in Jamshedpur and steelworkers themselves may also be invited to try life in India as the works doubles its output over the next five years to ten billion tonnes per annum. Steel workers in Port Talbot in Wales, earning up to and exceeding £30,000 a year, may balk at salaries of £2,800 to £7,000. But executives retaining their British salaries might enjoy the adventure. After taking a company jet up from Calcutta, an executive would probably find himself assigned a spacious bungalow with its own, well-tended garden. A Tata-made car and chauffeur would be on hand at all times to take him from the office to the lush city-centre golf course and then to whichever of the numerous clubs he decides to join. He probably won’t want to try to navigate the treacherous streets himself, populated as they are by drivers, motorcyclists and cyclists engaged in a suicidal game of dare with each other and the foraging cows that amble down the thoroughfares.

Jamshedpur was the brainchild of Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the dynasty, who heard Thomas Carlyle explain that the country that controlled steel would control gold. When Tata’s prospectors found iron ore in hills a hundred miles away, he ordered a steel city to be built almost a century ago at the confluence of two rivers. He stipulated that the city must be full of parks and wide, tree-lined avenues. The employees enjoyed an eight-hour working day, unheard of in the West. Today union officials are heavily consulted and there hasn’t been an industrial dispute for 75 years.

Mr Muthuraman insisted that this model of looking after workers could be replicated in the UK. “I believe so. We do what is required to look after people. We must look after employees and we must be competitive. We must strike a balance.” Mr Muthuraman sought to reassure the 24,000 Corus workers in Britain that his company's intention is to save jobs that would have been lost if the company carried on as it was. “Job losses doesn’t have a relationship with the deal, except positively.” But he refused to rule out job cuts in the future.

Tata Steel used to guarantee workers a job for life, but over the past decade it has been forced to reduce its workforce by almost half, from about 70,000 to 38,000. But its compensation package was unique in the corporate world. Workers who chose to take redundancy retained their salary until retirement age, albeit frozen at the level at which it stood in the year they left. If they were able to find another job they effectively drew two salaries. Mr Muthuraman admitted that “we may not be able to do that in Britain”.

Part of a huge conglomerate that is two-thirds controlled by charitable trusts, Tata Steel certainly seems to do a good job of looking after its people. But a word of warning: everyone in Jamshedpur is so thrilled with Tata Steel that after a couple of days of hearing endless extravagant praise for the company it becomes a little wearying and you begin to fear that you may be in the clutches of a cult.

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