TEA TIME

From the beginning of this year, the Indian Government imposed a life cap of 20 years on commercial vehicles. This will make a big dent in old truck restoration in India – though in this case, restoration has been to keep on trucking, as opposed to collectors saving classics for posterity.

The net effect will be to help manufacturers like Tata Motors, India’s biggest (and second biggest in the world when the lightest models are included). With an output running at around 180,000 units a year, Tata has over 40 percent of the country’s medium and heavy commercial vehicle market.

So – who is Tata? Aside from Tata Motors being India’s fifth biggest company, Tata Steel is the ninth biggest, Tata Consultancy is the eleventh biggest and Tata Power is the forty-third biggest. But the group has many more constituent businesses than that. As well as being India’s largest conglomerate, Tata is the biggest overseas owned industrial employer in Britain. It has had business interests here since 1907, the best known of which today is Jaguar Land Rover. And we cannot overlook Tetley Tea, part of a Tata business that ranks as the world’s second biggest tea producer. Anyone for a cuppa Tata?

Pedigree? You can say that again. Admittedly the picture is not so rosy at the moment, but with remarkable speed – in 2008, Tata rescued and re-energised Jaguar and Land Rover from the moribund state they were in at