Now Reading: From Madras mills to Chennai engines: 400 years of reinvention
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From Madras mills to Chennai engines: 400 years of reinvention
Chennai's business story began in 1639 as a colonial trading post at Fort St George, shipping cotton, indigo and hides. By the 1880s, an artificial harbour turned the open roadstead into a…
Chennai's business story began in 1639 as a colonial trading post at Fort St George, shipping cotton, indigo and hides. By the 1880s, an artificial harbour turned the open roadstead into a working port, and mills followed: Binny's Buckingham Mill in 1876, Carnatic Mill in 1881. Coaches came in 1840, car makers from 1948, and the Guindy Industrial Estate opened in 1958, one of India's first.
Post liberalisation, multinationals including Ford, Hyundai, Cognizant and Saint-Gobain set up base alongside homegrown firms such as MRF (the tyre maker) and TAFE (tractors). Guidance MD Deepak Jacob said the port brought mills, mills built the engineering base, and that base brought automakers and then electronics. The city now hosts Global Capability Centres, semiconductor plants, aerospace and defence units, and an electric-vehicle cluster.
From its 1907-founded Indian Bank to today's diversified economy, Madras built its banks before its factories, a foundation that later eased the services boom, Jacob noted. The coffee table book "Championing Enterprise" documents how in 1899 the Madras Presidency appointed Sir Alfred Chatterton to stimulate industrial technical education.
Indian Opinion Analysis
Madras was a manufacturing city before Bengaluru became India's tech capital, and that engineering depth explains why Chennai's economy is more diversified than most Indian metros. The Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry, founded in 1836 as a colonial trade body, is one of India's oldest business chambers. The Guindy Industrial Estate, set up in 1958, was a proto-SEZ decades before the 2005 Act. Guidance Tamil Nadu, the state's investment promotion agency, tracks capital commitments. The city's current semiconductor push, with a Tata assembly unit and CG Power- Renesas joint venture in Hosur, and its Global Capability Centre boom are the latest reinvention. The next inflection point to watch is whether the Chennai-Bengaluru industrial corridor and the new greenfield airports near Sriperumbudur and Parandur land the investments Jacob refers to for 2045.
Source: thehindu.com
This brief was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
