Place · planned industrial city · India
Jamshedpur
Also known as Jamshedpur, Sakchi, Tatanagar, Jamshedpur — the steel town
India's first fully planned industrial city, laid out from 1908 around the steel works Jamsetji Tata had spent his last years locating. It was built with piped water, electricity and schools from the start — conditions the surrounding colonial economy did not provide anywhere else.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.805, 86.203
Worth knowing
Tata died in 1904 without seeing the site chosen. His instruction to his son about the town — wide streets, shaded trees, lawns and playing fields — is quoted in full on the company's own literature and was largely followed.
Connections (3)
- PatronageJamsetji Tata
Jamsetji spent his last years locating a site with iron ore, coal, water and a railway within reach, and died in 1904 before it was found. His sons built the works at Sakchi from 1908 and the town around it — piped water, electricity, schools and playing fields from the start, which the surrounding colonial economy provided nowhere else. It was renamed Jamshedpur in 1919.
- Succession in timeKanpur
Kanpur after 1857 became one of the first large industrial cities in India — Elgin Mills, the Cawnpore Woollen Mills, leather and army boots — built on the cantonment contracts and the railhead that had made it a theatre of the uprising, and run on British capital. Jamshedpur, laid out from nothing forty years later by Jamsetji Tata's company, is the deliberate Indian answer to it: an industrial city planned and owned rather than accumulated, and the two together are most of what Indian heavy industry was before 1947.
- Site adjacencyBokaro Steel City
Bokaro Steel City and Jamshedpur are the two planned industrial townships of eastern India's coal-and-iron corridor on the Damodar and Subarnarekha rivers — Jamshedpur the private-sector Tata plant founded in 1908, Bokaro the fourth public-sector Steel Authority of India plant commissioned in 1964 with Soviet collaboration. The ninety kilometres between them along the Chotanagpur plateau is India's densest zone of integrated steel production. Both townships were laid out on orthogonal grids with sector numbering, the plant to one side and the township to the other, and both predate the formation of the Jharkhand state.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jamshedpur”. Parsi Panchayat records; John Hinnells, The Zoroastrian Diaspora.
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