How JAMSHEDPUR got that name??????



In 1907 when Sir Frederic Upcott, chief commissioner for railways in India, heard that Tata’s were going to set up a steel plant in India, he replied:



”Do u mean to say that Tata’s proposed to make steel rails to British specification??Why, I will undertake to eat every pound of steel rail they succeed in making”.



Jamsetji had gone to England to bring steel manufacturing technology for a steel plant which he wanted to set up in “Sakchi” in eastern India, but British steel manufacturers had refused to do so. Anyway he brought it from USA and established the plant.



In the next decade Tata’s supplied to the British government for the First World War, 1500 miles of steel rails which made possible the shifting of troops and war materials in Mesopotamia.



In recognition of the contribution of Tata steel, Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, came in 1919 to Sakchi and said:

“I can hardly imagine what we should have done during these 4 years of war if the Tata company had not been able to give us steel rails which have been provided for us, not only for Mesopotamia but for Egypt, Palestine and East Africa, and I have come to express my thanks….it is hard to imagine that 10 years ago this place was scrub and jungle; and here, we have now, this place set up with all its foundries and its workshops and its population of 40,000 to 50,000 people. This great enterprise has been due to the prescience, imagination and genius of the late Mr. Jmasetji Tata…

This place will see a change in its name and will no longer be known as Sakchi but be identified with the name of its Founder, bearing down through the ages the name of the late Mr. Jmasetji Tata. Here after this place will be known by the name of JAMSHEDPUR.




It is Jmasetji Tata, who at the beginning of 19th century conceived for India the first Steel Plant, the first Hydro Electric Project and a University of Science (IISC, Bangalore) ‘the like of which England didn’t have at that time’.