Best of the Week: Tata's next boss inherits more than a title — they inherit a mess

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When Natarajan Chandrasekaran announced he'd step down as Tata Sons chairman come 20 February 2027, the headlines understandably fixated on the exit itself, the "why" of it all. But peel back that layer, and you start asking who's walking into this job next, and what exactly are they inheriting?

A lot more than a corner office and a legacy brand. Whoever takes the reins will be handed nearly $10 billion in bank debt, a decade-long shareholder standoff worth potentially billions more, and a set of new-age bets that are still, quite literally, losing money.

Let's start with the debt. Four of Tata Sons' newest ventures, Air India, Tata Electronics, Agratas (its battery business) and Tata Digital, saw their combined borrowings balloon by 53% in just one year, hitting ₹88,277 crore ($10 billion) by March 2026. To put that in perspective, that's more debt growth than even Tata's most indebted listed giants, Tata Steel, Tata Motors and Tata Power, added over the same period. And unlike those established businesses, these four newer bets reported a combined loss of nearly ₹30,000 crore on revenue of ₹2.39 trillion. The semiconductor and battery businesses aren't even generating revenue yet.

Much of this borrowing is backed by Tata Sons itself, which means the holding company's own balance sheet carries real exposure. Creditors, in fact, now have 1.6 times more skin in the game than Tata Sons has invested directly.

This debt pile isn't just an accounting footnote, it's reportedly at the very heart of why Chandrasekaran is leaving. Noel Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts and the family's patriarch, was the lone dissenting voice on the Tata Sons board back in February, pushing for a clearer roadmap to profitability on these new bets. Months of back-and-forth, including presentations from the businesses' CEOs, apparently weren't enough to bridge the gap. So in August, Chandrasekaran wrote to the board, effectively saying that his time is up.

That puts Noel Tata, married, notably, to Shapoor Mistry's sister Aloo Mistry, in an unusually powerful position to shape not just who comes next, but how another long-simmering saga finally resolves. The Shapoorji Pallonji Group's 18.4% stake in Tata Sons.

The SP Group, sitting on expensive debt of its own, wants the debt out, or at least wants liquidity. Tata representatives are reportedly exploring a share swap in which SP Group could receive shares in listed entities such as Tata Power in exchange for some or all of its Tata Sons stake. Two other options are on the table, too. A direct buyout by Tata Sons using overseas bank financing, or a sale to an outside investor.

None of this is simple. Valuing Tata Sons, the entity that controls everything from Air India to the still-unlisted Tata Electronics, is a puzzle in itself. And there's a ticking clock. SP Group's recent bond issue, one of India's largest private credit deals, needs its first interest payment by July 2028. That gives all sides roughly 18 months to find common ground.

So Tata's next chairperson won't just be managing prestige and legacy. They'll be threading a needle between mounting losses on ambitious bets, mounting debt on the balance sheet, and a family-shareholder relationship that's been unresolved for the better part of a decade. As corporate advisor Srinath Sridharan puts it, the defining question will be resource allocation, whether capital decisions are driven by strategic merit, or by loyalty and legacy momentum instead.

Whoever gets the job in February 2027 will have their hands full from day one.

On to the best of Mint’s journalism from this week:

HDFC Bank isn't buying Subhash Chandra's ₹6.5-crore settlement

Chandra's team wants us to look past the headline number. HDFC Bank isn't buying it, and now wants the NCLT's approval of his ₹6.5-crore repayment plan overturned. The bank stands to recover just 3.2% of its claim and voted against the plan when it cleared with 80.81% creditor support. It's now weighing an appeal before the NCLAT. Chandra insists the real claim against him, as a mere guarantor, is only ₹3,992 crore, not ₹22,006 crore, as widely reported. Of that, ₹620 crore is already settled, and companies have offered ₹1,063 crore more. Is this a shocking 99.97% haircut, or a misunderstood technicality involving personal guarantees versus actual borrowing? Government sources say it's the latter, an "exceptional" case, not a template for future recoveries.

America's visa squeeze is pushing Indian IT offshore, fast

Would you pay over ₹85 lakh just to work in America? That's the new H-1B reality, a $103,265 surcharge on top of existing fees, plus a global pause on visa interviews while officers retrain. For Indian IT firms, who've long sponsored hundreds of engineers annually, the math has changed. Entry-level hiring takes a hit, L-1 audits get stricter, and the cost arbitrage that built the industry starts eroding. The likely response is more offshore delivery centres across India, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Companies will prioritize senior talent for US placements, lean harder on AI and automation, and possibly pass visa costs onto clients. Europe, meanwhile, is quietly becoming the more attractive bet, the EU Blue Card route costs far less, even if its own hurdles exist.

HDFC Bank's governance troubles are going global

It's been a tough stretch for HDFC Bank's reputation abroad. In New York, investor Jwalant Soneji has filed a securities fraud class-action alleging the bank disguised payments to Maharashtra's road agency, MSRDC, as marketing expenses to offer it better interest rates than regular depositors got, ₹45 crore at an effective 6.01% rate. The complaint leans on a damaging May report and even cites former chairman Atanu Chakraborty's resignation letter, which flagged practices "not in congruence" with his values. HDFC's ADS dropped sharply around both disclosures. The bank calls the suit meritless and points to an earlier independent review clearing it. Meanwhile in West Asia, 70 investors, many retired NRIs, are still waiting, some for six years, to recover money from a Luxembourg life-settlement fund pitched with 14-16% returns before redemptions froze in 2020.

Dr Reddy's after the windfall

Profits down 70%, North America sales down a third, the headlines look brutal. But talk to co-chairman G.V. Prasad, and it's less collapse than the end of a golden run. The culprits are a failed semaglutide batch that cost ₹2.4 billion and gutted a Canadian launch, plus the expiry of Dr Reddy's lucrative Revlimid settlement, which alone earned Indian generic makers $4-5 billion. "Those are lottery tickets," Prasad says. "It's never going to happen again." The US generics market, once forgiving, now has 20 filers racing each product to the bottom. Prasad calls it "a falling knife." His answer is to lean into biosimilars, chase Keytruda's eventual patent cliff, and keep funding Aurigene's slow-burning oncology bets, even while admitting the company isn't “as distinctive as we used to be.”

ChatGPT is bringing ads to India

How long ChatGPT could stay ad-free? The answer, at least in India, is, not much longer. OpenAI is rolling out advertisements to Indian users starting now, with one in five queries expected to show ads. WPP and Omnicom are the first partners, with ad pricing starting at just ₹725 a day, cheap enough, says VP Dave Dugan, to matter for small brands during festive shopping. About 80% of non-commercial queries won't see ads at all, OpenAI insists, to protect user trust. This comes as OpenAI preps for a 2027 IPO reportedly targeting a $1-trillion valuation. Dugan frames it differently though. As a way to subsidize free and low-cost access for over a billion weekly users worldwide. Interestingly, rival Claude has publicly committed to staying ad-free.

Inside India's race to own your health data

Walk into Ultrahuman's Bengaluru lab, and it feels nothing like a hospital. No waiting rooms, no queues, just blood tests, DEXA scans and up to 3,500 biological signals feeding into an AI that builds your personal health map. Biopeak, Kapiva and Praan Health are chasing a similar vision, continuous monitoring instead of one-off checkups. The pitch is, predictive health, not just reactive treatment. But your data doesn't just inform your care, it also trains these companies' AI systems. Biopeak's policy, for instance, allows de-identified data use for research and product development, and can't be pulled back once it's trained a model. Even hospitals like Apollo and Aster are racing to connect fragmented records into "lifelong companion" platforms. But doctors like Dr Praveen Gupta warn that endless monitoring risks turning patients into "perpetual observers" of their own bodies.

India's real trade problem might not be oil after all

For decades, oil was the easy answer to India's trade deficit story. Not anymore. Non-petroleum trade deficit has now overtaken petroleum's, running 1.4-1.8 times higher since 2022-23, with electronics emerging as a major culprit. Of India's $334-billion trade deficit in FY26, $214 billion came from non-petroleum products, with electronics alone contributing $69 billion, nearly a third of that gap. India is importing to manufacture more, not consume more. Assembly capacity has grown thanks to PLI schemes, but domestic value addition sits at just 20%. Electronic integrated circuits alone cost $30 billion in net imports. As GTRI's Ajay Srivastava puts it, India has "built large-scale assembly capacity" but still leans heavily on imported components like semiconductors and displays.

Can India actually build its own iPhone moment?

India assembles more smartphones than almost anywhere else. What it doesn't have is a phone brand of its own that matters. That's the gap the government's new ₹62,500-crore scheme wants to close. Under the newly notified Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme, a true "Indian brand" needs 51% Indian ownership, patents held domestically, and real R&D happening here, not just assembly. In return, 5% cash incentive on sales, plus 3% more for design-linked R&D. The catch is that brands like Lava still exist, but names like Micromax and Karbonn faded fast once Vivo, Oppo and OnePlus muscled in with deep marketing and distribution networks. Unlike 2013, when first-time buyers were everywhere, today's market has little room for newcomers. The government's answer lies in vague "non-fiscal support," possibly favouring Indian brands in public procurement.

The premium petrol loophole that could bring E10 back

For millions still driving pre-2023 vehicles, E20 has meant nagging concerns about mileage and engine wear. Now the government appears to be listening. Talks are underway with Indian Oil, BPCL and HPCL to explore swapping E20 for E10 within premium Octane 95 fuels, XP95, Speed, Power95, sidestepping the need for entirely new infrastructure. Octane 95's share of petrol sales has already jumped from 4% in March to 15% now, as anxious drivers pay ₹110-115 a litre for peace of mind. Octane 95 already has a separate pump chamber, so retailers say the switch could be done with minimal cost. Chief economic adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran has publicly backed the idea too. Not everyone's convinced, though. The government has dismissed running parallel nationwide fuel streams as impractical.

Aluminium becomes the next arena for Ambani vs Adani

Just months after Adani committed $11.5 billion to aluminium, Reliance Industries is reportedly exploring the same metal, sources told Mint. Two rivals, two very different empires, suddenly circling the same silvery-white opportunity. RIL's coal blocks in Andhra Pradesh and its planned coal gasification project could feed directly into an aluminium venture, making the fuel byproduct commercially useful. Reliance has already bid, unsuccessfully, for the massive Karlapat bauxite block in Odisha. Why the sudden interest from India's biggest conglomerates? Demand is set to nearly triple by FY47, and even with announced expansions, India faces a looming capacity gap of 1.4-1.5 million tonnes by FY30. Ambani and Adani have largely avoided competing head-on, until renewables, data centres, and now possibly aluminium changed that.

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