India’s Lethal Roads Claim Former TATA Chairman

Cyrus Mistry, the former Chairman of TATA India’s largest conglomerate, has become another statistic in India’s road death tally for the year. The billionaire died on Sunday whilst travelling to Mumbai, one other passenger was killed and two more travelling with him were hospitalised, Police in the western State of Maharashtra have reported.

The 54-year-old Mr Mistry had been ousted by TATA in 2016 and replaced by Ratan Tata who was the man that Mistry had replaced in the first place. Few details of the boardroom coup have ever been made public despite a long running legal case that played out in the Indian courts, which Ratan Tata eventually won.

TATA is a massive company that operates in over 100 countries globally with a product range that covers salt to steel, software to automobiles and last year had a revenue of USD130 billion, and that is a lot of zeros. Even though Mistry was no longer in charge over at TATA, his death still prompted the country’s Prime Minister, Mr Modi, to describe the death as a “big loss to India’s business world”.

There are few details about the crash except it happened as the Mercedes hit a road divider while crossing a bridge over a river and that Mr Mistry died at the crash scene. This crash, though, is just one more tragic example of the carnage on India’s roads. Currently India is rated as the fifth most dangerous country in the world to drive in with at least 150,000 deaths per annum, which is about 18 per hour to put it into perspective. On the flip side, only about 7% of Indian routinely wear seat belts which may of course be a part of the problem.