Best of the Week: Who gets the keys to Bombay House?

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There's a name conspicuously missing from every conversation happening inside Bombay House right now: Natarajan Chandrasekaran's. Barely a day after the man who ran the Tata empire for nine years told the board he wouldn't seek a third term, the only question anyone at India's biggest conglomerate seems to care about is who's next?

It's a deceptively simple question wrapped around a genuinely messy answer. Because this isn't just about picking a new chairman. It's about a 158-year-old business house deciding what kind of company it wants to be: family-run or professionally helmed, insider-led or outsider-driven, at the exact moment its ownership structure is tangled in a legal knot nobody saw coming.

The shortlist nobody's officially confirming

Start with the names actually being whispered in Tata circles. Tata Steel's T V Narendran is drawing the most attention, and for good reason. He's spent nearly four decades at the company, rising through the Tata Administrative Services, essentially the group's homegrown version of the civil service, and has spent recent years cleaning up Tata Steel's balance sheet while expanding the business. More importantly, he's one of two CEOs Noel Tata, the Tata Trusts chairman, regularly turns to for advice.

The other is Tata Power's Praveer Sinha, who's built similar trust with Noel over time. Then there's a second tier. Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles' Shailesh Chandra and Tata Chemicals' Ramakrishnan Mukundan, both credible, both currently running businesses that matter to the group's future.

But where it gets interesting is that Noel Tata isn't just weighing operational résumés. He's weighing bloodlines too.

The family angle: enter Neville and Maya

Noel Tata's 32-year-old son, Neville, has built a reputation of his own, not by trading on the family name, but by helping turn Trent's Zudio into one of India's biggest value-fashion stories. He now sits on the board of the Tata Indian Institute of Skills and was recently inducted as a trustee at Tata Trusts.

His sister Maya, meanwhile, has spent her time in the digital trenches, Tata Capital, then Tata Digital, working on the Tata Neu super-app and e-commerce bets like BigBasket and 1mg.

Would Noel push for his son to lead the group instead of stepping in himself? People close to the discussions say that's very much on the table. And it fits a pattern. Noel has made no secret of believing Tata companies should be run by people who understand the business, not just the balance sheet, insiders with demonstrated loyalty over polished outsiders. That instinct alone tilts the race toward familiar faces, whether they share his surname or not.

The board hasn't ruled out looking outside the group entirely either, especially given the scale of what's on the new chairman's plate, semiconductor investments running into billions of dollars, and businesses that will need steady hands for years, not quarters.

Why this isn't as simple as picking a name

Under Tata Sons' Articles of Association, the new chairman isn't picked by one person or even one board. A five-member selection committee does the choosing: three members jointly nominated by the two controlling trusts, Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and Sir Ratan Tata Trust; one nominated by the Tata Sons board; and one independent member chosen by Tata Sons itself.

Simple enough, in theory. Except one of those two trusts, Sir Ratan Tata Trust, currently can't do anything at all. A Maharashtra charity commissioner's order from mid-May has frozen its ability to hold board meetings or make decisions, following allegations from two of its own trustees about how the trust is composed. So while Sir Dorabji Tata Trust moved fast, thanking Chandrasekaran and passing a resolution to kick-start the search, its sister trust is legally paralysed. You can't build a five-person committee when one of your two main nominating bodies is sitting in regulatory limbo.

Tata Group insiders say they're hopeful of a favourable order from the commissioner "in the coming days, if not weeks," but privately, they don't expect resolution before the Tata Sons AGM on 18 August. If that happens, the AGM will likely need to be adjourned for lack of quorum, and with it, dividend payouts to shareholders, including the Trusts themselves, get delayed too. That has real consequences. Tata Trusts fund enormous amounts of philanthropic work, and a hold-up in dividends is a hold-up in that spending.

A succession plan that never really existed

Perhaps the most striking part of this whole saga is what it reveals about planning, or the lack of it. Noel Tata reportedly raised the question of succession planning with the head of Tata Sons' Nomination and Remuneration Committee not once, but twice over the past year and a half, first in January 2025 and again this February. Both times, he got vague reassurances instead of a plan.

That silence has a cost. It's the same institutional hesitation that turned Ratan Tata's split from Cyrus Mistry into a years-long legal battle a decade ago, and echoes an even older tussle when a young Ratan Tata had to wrestle control back from powerful company chiefs before he could truly lead the group. Bombay House, it seems, keeps relearning the same lesson. Ownership and management drifting apart in silence eventually becomes impossible to paper over.

Who actually wins this?

Strip away the corporate formality, and what's unfolding is a very human contest, between loyalty and fresh eyes, between blood and merit, between an operator who's proven himself running steel plants and a founder's son still proving himself in fashion retail and digital commerce. Six months isn't a lot of time to answer that question for an organisation this size, especially with one hand, literally, one trust, tied behind its back.

Will Tata Trusts bet on continuity by picking someone who already thinks like Noel does? Or will the pull of family finally win out after nearly a decade of professional stewardship? Bombay House has kept its secrets before. This time, all we need to see is if it can keep them a little longer. Or whether it even wants to.

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

Sanjeev Sanyal says school isn't working anymore

A thought that might ruffle a few feathers. Going to university, as we know it, is barely a century old. So why treat it as sacred? That's the provocation from Sanjeev Sanyal, EAC-PM member, who says India's real problem isn't jobs, it's employability.

AI, he argues, is already a better teacher than most lecture halls, and the old model of years spent listening to professors is becoming obsolete. His fix is to let 18-year-olds work and study together, because experience now outweighs classroom theory. And jobless growth? He calls it a myth. Growth and job creation, he says, have always moved together throughout history.

The telecom headcount reshuffle

India's telecom giants added jobs, then quietly started shedding them, and it's not really about a slowdown. It's about a shift.

Jio, Airtel and Vodafone Idea together added 30,000-odd jobs over five years, but the story isn't uniform. Airtel and Vodafone Idea grew their headcount; Jio's shrank by over 10%, partly because it's turning customers into micro-entrepreneurs instead of hiring employees.

With 5G rollouts winding down and AI, cloud specialists taking over routine roles, junior and mid-level jobs are feeling the squeeze most. Is telecom really slowing down, or just getting leaner?

Old iPhones are getting pricier

Isn't depreciation supposed to make old phones cheaper? Not for iPhones.

A two-year-old iPhone 15 now costs around ₹48,000 on refurbished platforms, nearly double what a similarly aged iPhone 12 cost just three years back. Blame it on rising prices of new phones, fierce demand, and Indians simply refusing to let go of their iPhones, choking supply.

Retailers like Cashify and ControlZ are even paying sellers 30-40% more just to secure stock. With Apple's next launch expected to push prices higher still, the old cycle of "wait and it gets cheaper" might be breaking for good.

One video made Meta answer to parliament

Four hours and thirty minutes. That's all it took for a temporarily suspended Facebook video of PM Modi to trigger a two-hour closed-door grilling of Meta by India's parliamentary IT committee, with lawmakers cutting across party lines to demand answers. Meta blamed an "error" and apologized, but MPs went further, floating a demand to strip the platform's safe harbour protection entirely. Legal experts, though, say that's not how it works, safe harbour is lost case-by-case, not in one sweeping move.

Beyond the video, the meeting circled back to bigger questions like algorithmic bias, content moderation and accountability.

Big four, meet your new competition

For years, Indian consultancy firms have watched government contracts slip past them, blocked by turnover thresholds only global giants could clear. That's changing. The Centre has relaxed eligibility rules, easing high turnover requirements, cutting excessive weight on past experience, and tying payroll criteria to what a project actually needs. The result is that domestic firms finally get a real shot at bidding alongside Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG.

Evaluations will now lean more on methodology and the people actually doing the work, not just brand names. With India's consulting market set to nearly double to $17 billion by 2031, could this be the moment for smaller Indian firms?

Dividends rise, but companies keep more cash

Indian companies paid out more to shareholders in FY26, but the generosity is cooling. A Mint analysis of BSE 500 firms found aggregate dividends rose 8.2% to ₹5.13 trillion, slower than the 11.9% growth in FY25. The bigger signal: the dividend payout ratio fell to a 12-year low of 27.6%, as companies held on to more earnings amid uncertain business conditions and investment plans.

The payout was also heavily concentrated, with TCS, HDFC Bank, Infosys, ITC, ONGC and Coal India accounting for 26% of the total. Buybacks, meanwhile, are gaining ground.

India’s monuments need more than a makeover

India’s 3,688 centrally protected monuments are a key draw for tourists, but funding for their upkeep has been uneven. Archaeological Survey of India's spending rose from ₹269.6 crore in FY22 to a peak of ₹443.5 crore in FY24, before slipping to ₹313 crore in FY25 and recovering to ₹376.7 crore in FY26. Major sites such as Agra, Aurangabad and Hampi also saw sharp funding cuts after FY24.

The timing matters: foreign tourist arrivals fell 9.4% in 2025 and remain below pre-pandemic levels. Experts say India needs not just more money, but smarter, preventive conservation.

India’s government schools are losing ground

India’s public education system is facing a worrying squeeze. Nearly 84,000 government and aided schools have shut since 2018-19, while enrolment has fallen by almost 15 million. A Mint analysis of 21 large states and Union territories shows sharp differences in school infrastructure, with Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka among the weakest performers. States with better facilities have also seen a slower enrollment decline.

Yet education spending remains below Unesco’s recommended levels, while rising cash transfers risk crowding out long-term investment. The result: fewer schools, fewer students and persistent infrastructure gaps.

Centre moves to untangle India’s mineral tax maze

The Centre has introduced a Bill seeking to stop states from imposing taxes, cesses or other levies on minerals, two years after the Supreme Court upheld their power to do so. The move aims to ease the growing tax burden on miners and manufacturers. States such as Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu have since introduced mineral levies, while others continue to charge them under existing laws.

For industries such as cement, where royalties and taxes can account for nearly half the value of minerals such as limestone, the new law could improve competitiveness, encourage investment and make mining more commercially viable.

Adani’s cash machine goes shopping

Adani Infra (India) Ltd, Adani Group’s promoter-owned project management and EPC arm, has rapidly turned into the conglomerate’s biggest cash generator. Its FY26 profit jumped to ₹7,127 crore, while revenue surged 13-fold in two years to ₹11,301 crore. Much of that cash is now finding its way back into the group: Adani Infra has spent ₹11,561 crore in seven months buying stakes in four listed Adani companies, including Adani Green Energy, Adani Power and Adani Enterprises.

While the group says the structure improves efficiency, governance experts remain divided over the optics of promoter-owned entities buying shares in listed group companies.

That’s all from us this week. Subscribe to our newsletters and the website for what’s in the news and beyond it. Write to us at newsletters@livemint.com.