Tata Sons Dilemma: To List Or Not To List

The upcoming Tata Sons board meeting in June could possibly throw some light on several critical issues that may have a bearing on the future of the corporate behemoth.

The mood was sombre at the Tata Trusts headquarters, Mumbai, on October 11, 2024, when the trustees of the largest shareholder of Tata Sons gathered for two back-to-back meetings.

The first was a condolence meeting for Ratan Tata, the chairman who had died two days ago at age 86.

The second was to choose a successor -- a subject that was only discussed in hushed tones while he was alive.

Ratan Tata's half-brother Noel Naval Tata was unanimously chosen as Tata Trusts chairman with immediate effect.

Some 19 months on, Tata Trusts is a fractured house amid forced eviction of trustees, questions over governance, split views on listing of Tata Sons and uncertainty about the future of the group.

What went wrong at this organisation meant for philanthropy while owning 66 per cent in Tata Sons, the holding company of the salt-to-software conglomerate?

After Ratan

The first major development after the appointment of Noel Tata -- who steered Trent, Voltas and Tata Investment Corp -- as chairman was his induction into the Tata Sons board in November 2024.

The amended rules of the Articles of Association of the Tata Group don't allow any one person to hold the position of both Tata Sons chairman and Tata Trusts chairman.

In July 2025, Tata Trusts passed a resolution against any move to list Tata Sons.

Listing of Tata Sons has been a live issue ever since the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) classified it as an upper layer Core Investment Company (CIC) in September 2022, mandating it to become a public listed entity within three years.

Subsequently, Tata Sons became a debt-free company and sought an exemption from listing. But the RBI has remained silent on what Tata Sons must do.

The July 2025 resolution also unanimously backed a third five-year term for Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran (or Chandra as he's known).

A source pointed out that both the issues adopted through the resolution came to haunt stakeholders soon after.

Murmurs of lobbies and divisions at Tata Trusts had started by this time, and the friction became public in September 2025.

For the first time, voting was used to remove a fellow trustee -- former defence secretary and vice-chairman of Tata Trusts Vijay Singh -- as nominee director of Tata Sons.

On one side was a group of trustees -- Mehli Mistry, Pramit Jhaveri, Darius Khambata and Jehangir H C Jehangir -- who voted against the renewal of Singh's term as a nominee director, while Noel Tata and Venu Srinivasan voted in his favour.

From three, the number of nominee directors of Tata Sons was down to two -- Noel Tata and industrialist Venu Srinivasan.

Not surprisingly, the infighting within Tata Trusts was by now being discussed in the corridors of power in New Delhi.

On October 8, Home Minister Amit Shah and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman met Noel Tata and Chandra to discuss ways to untangle the issue.

Even as the government stepped in, mindful of the Tata group's significance to the economy, the conflicts escalated.

On October 29, in another round of voting, Mehli Mistry, considered close to Ratan Tata, was voted out of the trusts.

A majority of trustees, including Noel Tata, Singh and Srinivasan, voted against Mistry's reappointment to the board of Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and Sir Ratan Tata Trust -- the two main shareholders of Tata Trusts.

In that troubled environment, Tata Trusts got its youngest member in November when Noel's son, Neville Tata, 32, was inducted into Sir Dorabji Tata Trust.

Neville, who leads Star Bazaar, the hypermarket store chain operated by Trent, had the unanimous support of the Tata Trusts board.

Battle lines

Three months later, a Tata Sons board meeting held in February 2026 made headlines: Noel Tata had raised questions around the profitability of several Tata entities, linking them to Chandra getting a third term starting February 2027.

One condition for the renewal of his term was to keep Tata Sons, the parent of the $160 billion group with around 30 major companies, unlisted.

Listing of Tata Sons would invariably result in the amendment of the Articles of Association of Tata Sons and may take away the veto power of the nominee directors, people in the know said.

By now, the groupings within Tata Trusts were undergoing changes.

In April 2026, the issue of barring non-Parsis from Bai Hirabhai Jamsetji Tata Navsari Charitable Institution cropped up after former Tata Trusts trustee Mehli Mistry approached the Maharashtra Charity Commissioner seeking a probe into alleged irregularities at this affiliate trust.

While Srinivasan quit after being told to do so, Singh did not, citing a legal opinion by former chief justice M H Kania that was secured by Ratan Tata way back in 2000.

Tata Trusts issued a statement saying the trust deed would be amended.

Last month, Srinivasan and Singh -- both long-term Ratan Tata confidants -- set off alarm bells by coming out in favour of listing Tata Sons in media interviews, pointing to the need for raising funds for the group's new capital-intensive businesses.

This was followed by their eviction in May from the Tata Education and Development Trust (TEDT) -- a small but important trust.

For the first time, Noel Tata voted against the reappointment of Singh and Srinivasan. The battle lines were drawn.

Then came the most recent of the now-on-now-off board meeting of Tata Trusts to review nominee directors on Tata Sons and discuss the matter of listing.

On May 15, the Maharashtra Charity Commissioner, for the first time in the history of Tata Trusts, intervened to stop a scheduled meeting amid fears it might have ousted Srinivasan as nominee director, leaving Noel Tata as the sole nominee director at Tata Sons.

The Charity Commissioner also ordered an inquiry into the alleged violations at the Sir Ratan Tata Trust over perpetual trustees.

The Maharashtra Trust Act had been amended in September 2025, limiting the number of perpetual trustees to a fourth of the total.

To comply, two of the three perpetual trustees -- Ratan Tata's brother Jimmy Tata, Noel and Jehangir Jehangir -- will need to step down at SRTT and seek renomination with a tenure.

To list or not to list

Analysts believe listing Tata Sons is one way to ensure that the group is governed in a transparent manner without the veto power of nominee directors coming in the way.

According to the Articles of Association of Tata Sons, a nominee director has veto powers linked to appointment and removal of top executives.

Shriram Subramanian, managing director at InGovern Research, a corporate governance research and advisory firm, said that although Tata Sons had repaid all its debts and sought to deregister as an upper-layer non-banking financial company in 2024, the RBI had clarified recently that even indirect access to public funds would imply that the CIC cannot be deregistered.

Since companies such as Tata Motors, Tata Steel, Tata Consumer Products and others have access to public funds, Tata Sons is also considered to have indirect access to public funds, he told Business Standard.

Many former bureaucrats, speaking to this newspaper, also favoured listing. K M Chandrasekhar, who served as Cabinet secretary from 2007 to 2011, said: "Listing is always good as it leads to greater transparency and shareholder oversight."

According to former finance secretary Ashok Chawla, listing is certainly the appropriate architecture, not only because of the RBI classification but also due to the imperative of governance and transparency in respect of an entity which controls a number of important and large companies.

What may have been acceptable years and decades ago, Chawla added, cannot be the right framework in today's context.

R Gopalakrishnan, former executive director of Tata Sons, said both Tata Sons and Tata Trusts -- the enterprise and philanthropy -- are integral to the deeply held organisational philosophy.

In a recently published piece in Business Standard, Gopalakrishnan said: 'For many decades, the same person chaired both, effectively making it a seamless system. Recently, Tata has been experiencing the pangs of separate chairmen, a duality that is new to Tata.'

According to him, the solution does not lie in thinking about public listing or a surname but in 'great maturity', 'conversations', and 'privacy'.

As for the listing of Tata Sons, the RBI may break its silence soon even as the key stakeholders hold divergent views.

Tata Sons' largest shareholder Tata Trusts is opposing listing, while two of its vice-chairmen have spoken in its favour recently.

The second-largest shareholder, the Shapoorji Pallonji group, is backing Tata Sons' listing to allow it to dilute its stake and invest in its core businesses.

Tata Sons opposed listing earlier, but its latest stand on the subject has not yet been made public.

The upcoming Tata Sons board meeting in June could possibly throw some light on several critical issues that may have a bearing on the future of the corporate behemoth.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff