In 1976, One Angry Postcard To JRD Tata Changed Sudha Murty's Life Forever

In 1974, a final-year computer science student at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore saw a job listing from Telco, the Tata-owned automobile company, that ended with a line she couldn’t let go: women need not apply. That student was Sudha Murty, and instead of quietly moving on, she sat down and wrote a postcard directly to JRD Tata, the head of the Tata Group, laying out her frustration at a company built on progress practising exactly the kind of discrimination she didn’t expect from it.

In a blog on Tata.com, she writes, “To this day I remember clearly what I wrote. “The great Tatas have always been pioneers. They are the people who started the basic infrastructure industries in India, such as iron and steel, chemicals, textiles

and locomotives. They have cared for higher education in India since 1900 and they were responsible for the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science. Fortunately, I study there. But I am surprised how a company such as Telco is discriminating on the basis of gender.”

I posted the letter and forgot about it. Less than 10 days later, I received a telegram stating that I had to appear for an interview at Telco’s Pune facility at the company’s expense.”

She went, half expecting to be turned away purely on principle, and found herself facing a panel of six people who already knew exactly who she was: the woman who had written to JRD. “The panel asked me technical questions and I answered all of them. Then an elderly gentleman with an affectionate voice told me, “Do you know why we said lady candidates need not apply? The reason is that we have never employed any ladies on the shop floor. This is not a co-ed college; this is a factory. When it comes to academics, you are a first ranker throughout. We appreciate that, but people like you should work in research laboratories,” she shares. As expected, Murty pushed back, arguing that someone had to be first. She got the job, becoming the first woman to work on Telco’s shop floor.

The postcard wasn’t the end of her story with JRD Tata, it was just the beginning of a recurring presence in her working life. She didn’t actually meet him until she was transferred to Bombay, where he walked into a meeting she was having with the company’s chairman and asked her name, with no mention of the postcard that had gotten her there in the first place. Later, on an evening when she was waiting outside the office for her husband to pick her up, JRD noticed her standing alone in an empty corridor and stayed with her until her husband arrived, telling her, in a line that has stayed with her ever since, “Young lady, tell your husband never to make his wife wait again.”

Their last conversation came years later, in 1982, when Murty was leaving Telco to move to Pune, where her husband was starting a small company called Infosys. Running into JRD on the stairs of Bombay House on her way out, she told him about the move. He asked what she’d do if the venture succeeded, and when she said she wasn’t sure they would, he offered her advice she carried for the rest of her life. “Never start with diffidence,” he advised her. “Always start with confidence. When you are successful you must give back to society. Society gives us so much; we must reciprocate. I wish you all the best.” He urged her never to begin anything with self-doubt, and reminding her that success comes with an obligation to give back. It was the last time she saw him alive.

Decades later, close to half of today’s engineering students are women, and that women now work on factory floors across industries that once excluded them outright. It’s a small measure of how far one postcard, and one man willing to read it seriously, helped move the needle.