Natarajan Chandrasekaran (born 2 June 1963), often called Chandra, is an Indian business executive who has been Chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group, since 2017. He is the first person from outside the Parsi community, and the first who is not a member of a shareholding family, to head the group. He spent thirty years at Tata Consultancy Services, which he led as chief executive from 2009.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Natarajan Chandrasekaran |
| Born | 2 June 1963, Mohanur, Namakkal district, Tamil Nadu |
| Age | 63 |
| Education | Coimbatore Institute of Technology (B.Sc. in applied sciences); Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirappalli (MCA, 1986) |
| Occupation | Business executive |
| Positions | Chairman, Tata Sons (since 2017); CEO, Tata Consultancy Services (2009–2017) |
| Awards | Padma Bhushan (2022) |
| Spouse | Lalitha |
| Children | 1 |
Early Life
He was born at Mohanur, a village on the Kaveri, into a farming family, one of six children. His father, a lawyer by training, had returned to manage the family’s land. He studied in a Tamil-medium government school and walked several kilometres to it with his brothers.
After a degree in applied sciences at Coimbatore he tried farming for some months, decided it was not for him, and took a master’s degree in computer applications at the Regional Engineering College in Tiruchirappalli, now a National Institute of Technology.
Career
Tata Consultancy Services
He joined TCS in 1987 as an intern and stayed. He worked as a programmer and then on projects for clients abroad, and for a time was assistant to the chief executive, S. Ramadorai. He became chief operating officer in 2007 and chief executive on 6 October 2009, at forty-six, one of the youngest heads of a large Tata company.
In his seven years in charge, TCS’s annual revenue rose from about 6 billion to more than 16 billion US dollars, its workforce more than doubled, and it became the most valuable company in India.
Tata Sons
In October 2016 the board of Tata Sons removed its chairman, Cyrus Mistry, and a bitter public and legal battle followed. In January 2017 Chandrasekaran was named as his successor and took office on 21 February. He was given a second five-year term in 2022.
His task was to simplify a group of about a hundred companies and to stop the losses of several of them.
- **Steel:** bought Bhushan Steel out of bankruptcy and restructured the European business
- **Telecom:** closed the loss-making mobile telephone operation
- **Air India:** in January 2022 the group took back the national airline, which the government had nationalised in 1953, and has since merged its other airlines into it and ordered hundreds of new aircraft
- **Consumer and digital:** created Tata Consumer Products, bought the online grocer BigBasket and the pharmacy 1mg, and launched the Tata Neu app
- **Electronics:** began assembling iPhones in India and started work on semiconductor plants in Gujarat and Assam
- **Vehicles:** Tata Motors became the country’s leading maker of electric cars
The group’s founder was Jamsetji Tata. Chandrasekaran worked for years with Ratan Tata, the chairman emeritus, who died in October 2024.
Other roles
He has been a director of the Reserve Bank of India and chaired the business forum of the G20 during India’s presidency in 2023. With Roopa Purushothaman he wrote Bridgital Nation (2019), on using technology to create jobs.
Running
Diagnosed with a risk of diabetes in his forties, he took up running, and has completed marathons in Boston, Chicago, Berlin, New York, Tokyo and Mumbai, among others.
Honours
He received the Padma Bhushan in 2022 and holds several honorary doctorates.
Personal Life
He is married to Lalitha, and they have a son, Pranav. Two of his brothers also became senior executives: N. Ganapathy Subramaniam at TCS and N. Srinivasan at the Murugappa Group. He is a keen photographer and a follower of Carnatic music.
Featured image: N. Chandrasekaran, then chief executive of TCS, at the India Economic Summit in Mumbai, November 2011. Photo by the World Economic Forum, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
