Mumbai: At 2.30pm on Tuesday, 18 August, the shareholders of Tata Sons joined a video call to clear a short, dull agenda. Approve the accounts for the year to March. Declare a dividend. And confirm N. Chandrasekaran for another spell on the board.
The annual general meeting never began because Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT), the second largest shareholder in Tata Sons with a 23.56% stake, was not able to nominate a member to represent it. SRTT has been hobbled by a 15 May order by the Maharashtra Charity Commissioner that prevented it from convening its own board meeting to decide on a nominee.
According to the Tata Sons Articles of Association, a meeting can have a quorum only if the two biggest shareholders (Sir Dorabji Tata Trust is the largest shareholder, with a 27.98% holding) are represented. SDTT and SRTT together hold more than 51% of the holding company.
With no quorum, the meeting was adjourned. It was the first-ever adjournment in the history of Tata Sons, the Tata Group’s holding company, which sits atop 26 listed companies, valued at $277 billion as of the end of March 2026.
The machinery had jammed just when Noel Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts, which owns around two-third of Tata Sons through SDTT, SRTT and a number of other smaller trusts, was set to take centrestage as the group’s top decisionmaker.
But the stalled meeting is the least of Noel’s problems. The machine itself is not the one the Tatas have run for a century. Chandrasekaran has replaced it.
A one-man show
Chandrasekaran took charge as the chairman of Tata Sons in February 2017, succeeding Cyrus Mistry, who had been forced out in an ugly boardroom coup orchestrated by Ratan Tata, the group’s patriarch.
The new chairman, who came into the top job following a highly successful tenure as the boss of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the group’s cash cow, soon came into his own and began operating unchallenged.
Early into his tenure, Chandrasekaran outlined plans to build Tata Digital into a $100 billion business. He shared it with a dozen senior executives in the summer of 2019. Noel, arguably, was the sole executive to express scepticism when the plan was presented, according to a group executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But then Chandrasekaran was chairman of Tata Sons while Noel was only the chairman of a group entity, Trent Ltd.
Under Chandrasekaran, Tata Sons soon began to resemble Adani Enterprises—the listed incubator Gautam Adani runs himself, where new businesses are built under one roof, and the buck for all of them stops at the top.
Decisions of enormous consequence were taken by Chandrasekaran, with a board that— in the eventual judgement of Tata Trusts—was neither adequately consulted nor kept informed.
Last June, while preparing a lengthy assessment of the Tata Group’s new investments, Mint sent Chandrasekaran a detailed list of questions, mostly on how those investments were performing. The request was declined. The message that came back via an interlocutor was that not even Chandrasekaran’s board had put such questions to him, and that he had no wish to take part in what looked like a report card.
At the time it read as the confidence of a man who felt secure. In hindsight it reads as the culture that the owners eventually rebelled against—a holding company run as a personal mandate rather than a shared enterprise.
The pushback
On 9 October 2024, Ratan Tata passed away, and less than 48 hours later, in a calm handover, Noel took over as chair of Tata Trusts, which sits above the entire group thanks to its majority holding in Tata Sons.
If it was in Chandrasekaran’s remit to size up Noel in Trent, the opposite became true after the latter took over as the head of Tata Trusts overseeing Tata Sons. In under two years, it turned into a straight fight, with the principal shareholders on one side and the man who ran their group on the other.
The owners’ central grievance, when it finally surfaced, was not that Chandrasekaran’s bets were wrong but that they had been made around them.
On 24 February, the Tata Sons board weighed a third term for Chandrasekaran. Four of six directors backed it. Noel did not.
The new Tata Trusts chairman wanted to know the profitability roadmap for four businesses launched after Chandrasekaran took over: airlines (Air India), assembling iPhones for Apple and building semiconductors (Tata Electronics), quick commerce and online sales (Tata Digital), and building high-quality batteries for the mobility sector (Agratas). Together the four businesses had lost about ₹29,924 crore in FY26.
Chandrasekaran, who was on the boards of all four businesses, had presided over everything. “Beyond the capital allocation, not a single business decision of any of these businesses has been discussed at the board (of Tata Sons),” said a former Tata Sons board member on condition of anonymity.
Long used to operating unchallenged, the Tata Sons chief was taken aback by Noel’s questioning. It soon became clear that he had lost the owner’s trust.
Six months later, on 12 August, Chandrasekaran said he would not seek another term. His tenure ends on 20 February 2027.
Struggling bets
If the governance is fragile, the businesses are impatient. And because Tata Sons now runs bets of its own, the vacant chair cannot wait. Over nine years, Chandrasekaran deployed over ₹55,000 crore of the holding company’s money into its four new ventures, and almost all of it remains work in progress.
The showcase bet was Tata Digital. The group has poured more than ₹22,000 crore into the business. The Tata Neu platform was meant to be the single front door to everything the group sells. It has instead muddled through leadership changes and losses, poor consumer traction, and a strategy that has been left in tatters by the quick-commerce wave it was never built for.
The second flagship is Tata Electronics. The company is building the country’s first major semiconductor fabrication unit at Dholera in Gujarat, in a technology tie-up with Taiwan’s Powerchip, alongside iPhone-assembly lines and a packaging unit in Assam—a set of businesses so capital-hungry and slow to mature that even seasoned global players stumble in them.
Then there is Air India, still loss-making three-and-a-half years after the Tatas bought it back from the state, now under a brand-new chief executive, Tewolde Gebremariam. The aviation veteran was named only this month to succeed Campbell Wilson and steady an airline still recovering from last year’s crash.
Finally, there is a nascent battery-storage push whose contours are barely public.
None of these businesses generates cash yet, but all of them consume it.
“Diversification is not necessarily par for the course and history shows us that widely diversified conglomerates become unwieldy beyond a point and lose value,” said Kannan Ramaswamy, the William D. Hacker Chair Professor of Management at the US-based Thunderbird School of Global Management. “Ideally, the diversification strategy must ensure that the investment portfolio is continually pruned and nurtured to enable new growth. This requires disciplined thinking about new investments, especially in areas where the company has no apparent overlap (unrelated diversification).”
For now, the real danger is to the ATM that helped Tata Sons incubate each of these businesses.
TCS, the group’s cash machine, cut its dividend for the year to March 2026, and Tata Sons’ take fell around 12% to ₹28,291 crore, the squeeze compounded by the artificial-intelligence pressures now bearing down on the IT sector.
“If I were an investor, this (TCS) would be my most significant worry,” said Ramaswamy. “It is most vulnerable due to the emergence of AI. Instead of Tata Digital, perhaps Chandra ought to (have) looked into investing more in AI businesses where they have the core knowledge, human resources, and more willing customers.”
The next chairman will thus inherit a portfolio of long-dated, unfinished bets at precisely the moment the engine funding them is losing power.
The Trust factor
Tata Sons’ articles require a board of between five and 15 directors. Today there are six: Chandrasekaran, Noel Tata and a second Trust representative, Venu Srinivasan, Tata Group chief financial officer Saurabh Agrawal, and two independent directors, Harish Manwani and Anita George. Chandrasekaran leaves next February; Manwani’s second term ends that May. If a departing chairperson is replaced, the board holds at six, but another exit will leave the board at the threshold of five.
A Tata Sons board refresh is tied to how quickly SRTT receives the Mumbai Charity Commissioner’s go-ahead to continue its operations.
Moreover, a September 2025 Maharashtra ordinance now requires trustee appointments to be unanimous rather than carried by a majority, which, in a divided house, could make the expansion of Tata Trusts, and consequently, the board of Tata Sons, difficult.
Noel’s ‘in’ tray
What, then, must Noel actually do? “Unlike the last time, when there was one fight between Cyrus and Ratan Tata, this time around there are too many problems and uncertainties,” said the group executive cited earlier.
First, the cash machine. TCS is the source of most of the money that funds everything else, and its leadership is in transition. Chandrasekaran revived the chief operating officer’s role—the very post he once held on his way to the top—and appointed a close associate, Aarthi Subramanian, to it. She is a respected group insider, but her performance in that operational seat is untested, and Noel must satisfy himself that the company generating the group’s oxygen is in steady hands as AI reshapes its industry. Especially after the company let go of over 12,000 employees and reported its first annual revenue decline since listing.
Second, the government. In an earlier era, the Tatas kept a studied distance from the state. No longer. The semiconductor plants depend on public subsidies that can run to half their setup cost; Air India needs official goodwill on everything from routes to aircraft. Both Chandrasekaran and Noel have already, by some accounts, briefed the government separately about their rift—an awkward indication of how entangled the group has become with New Delhi. Managing that relationship without a settled chairperson is now on Noel.
Third, he must reconstitute not one board but two, at the Trusts and at Tata Sons, against the drag of the Mumbai Charity Commissioner’s restrictions.
In between, he also has to find a solution to provide an exit for the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, which owns 18.38% in Tata Sons.
“Noel recognises that it is only fair to give the SP Group an exit,” said the Tata Group executive. “There are a lot of options, including selling shares in Tata Capital, Tata Auto Components, and any other company that is ready to be listed,” the executive added, when asked how Tata Group would find the money.
The biggest immediate challenge, of course, will be to appoint a new group chairman. That is easier said than done, especially given how the outgoing chairman operated. For close to a century, Tata Sons supervised. It owned the group’s companies and let their bosses run them; when a business faltered, its chief had to answer. “The question will be whether the next Tata Sons chair will be a super-CEO like Chandra or go back to the old soft-touch way, listening to individual CEOs and boards of individual companies,” said a second group executive.
Noel Tata, while he has not really been tested in this role, is not a novice. A member of the founding family, he has run an operating company himself, and run it well: under his chairmanship, Trent became one of the group’s fastest-growing businesses by market value, second to few.
Still, Trent was merely a group company, and Noel was, for years, kept on the fringes of the succession line. Now, he has at last reached the centre. He arrives to find the levers jammed, the treasury thinning, the flagship bets unfinished, and the state as a partner he cannot afford to alienate.
“Season 1 is over,” a person close to the new order remarked after Chandrasekaran resigned. “Let’s see what is in store.”
Read more from Mint’s exclusive coverage of Tata Sons