Ratanji Tata was born in Bombay in
British India as the son of the noted
Parsi merchant
Jamsetji Tata. Ratan Tata was educated at
St. Xavier's College in
Bombay and afterwards entered his father's firm. On the death of the elder Tata in 1904, Ratanji Tata and his brother
Dorabji Tata inherited a very large fortune, much of which they devoted to philanthropic works of a practical nature and to the establishment of various industrial enterprises for developing the resources of
India. An Indian institute of scientific and medical research (
Indian Institute of Science, IISc) was founded at
Bangalore in 1905, and in 1912 the
Tata Steel began work at
Sakchi, in the
Central Provinces, with marked success. The most important of the Tata enterprises, however, was the storing of the water power of the
Western Ghats (1915), which provided Bombay with an enormous amount of electrical power, and hence vastly increased the productive capacity of its industries. Sir Ratan Tata, who was
knighted in 1916, did not confine his benefactions to India. In
England, where he had a permanent residence at York House,
Twickenham, he founded in 1912 the Ratan Tata department of social science and administration at the
London School of Economics, and also established a Ratan Tata Fund at the
University of London for studying the conditions of the poorer classes. In 1909, he donated a sum of Rs. 50,000 (equivalent to approximately Rs. 40 million in 2022) to
Mahatma Gandhi to aid the struggle of Indians' right to work in the
Transvaal. This donation helped in securing the finances of Gandhi's protests against the Anglo-Boer rulers. He was a great connoisseur of arts. The
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly
Prince of Wales Museum) has a section displaying the collections of Sir Ratanji Tata (acquired in 1923) along with two other sections that of Sir
Dorab Tata (acquired in 1933) and Sir Purushottam Mavji (acquired in 1915). ==Personal life==