The world sat up and took notice of the Tata Group in the first decade of the 21st century. How? A string of prestigious acquisitions

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abroad and an unimaginably cheap car, transformed the 140-year-old Indian business house into a global conglomerate. However, it will be interesting to see where the group heads for in the next decade when its charismatic chairman Ratan Tata makes way for a younger person to take over the reins.

Just imagine, at the beginning of the millennium, the Tata group was staring at two disappointments — a huge loss of Rs 550 crore at its flagship company Telco (now Tata Motors) and the financial mess at Tata Finance. However, after a decade, the group is a name to reckon with in the international corporate scene on the basis of Ratan Tata's daring acquisitions of coveted global assets, starting with Tetley in the fall of 2000 and moving to top gear with Jaguar Land Rover in June 2008.

Tata Steel's $13 billion Corus acquisition is the largest overseas deal by an Indian firm. The group's revenues have jumped nine times from Rs 35,937 crore in the late 90's to Rs 3,25,334 crore in 2008-09, with 65% of the revenues coming from overseas.

But apart from these big-ticket deals, what made the group tick was the creation of a business model that will tap the masses — a model that was inspired by the bottom of the pyramid theme. And here's where the Nano drives in — an almost impossible feat, a people's car with a Rs 1 lakh tag.

It was the brainchild of Ratan Tata, a Capricorn, who turned 72 a couple of days ago, became the group's chairman in 1991. According to a a Tata veteran, the group has gone through three phases since then. One, he established control over the group, which was then tightly managed by a few people. Two, he kicked off the restructuring and restrategising programme: He set a goal to be among the top three players in the businesses the group has a presence in, to increase the group's minuscule holding to a comfortable position; and formation of a common brand identity in the two-dimensional Tata blue logo.

Third, perhaps the most ambitious, was building a global empire. The group had some setbacks too during the decade. For example, the abandonment of the $3 billion investment in Bangladesh, pulling out the Nano project from West Bengal, the terror attacks on its hotel, Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, and the financial stress it experienced as a result of the global meltdown.

However, the next decade would see a major change in the Tata group. Ratan Tata would retire from Tata Sons in 2012, when he turns 75, to make way for a successor. However, he may continue to be the chairman of Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and Sir Ratan Trust — the two charitable trusts that hold a major stake in Tata Sons — a position his predecessor JRD Tata held till his death. He has built a global business empire. What's next for the Tata Group?

Our home is at risk

After three centuries of relentless damage to earth's delicately balanced ecology, humanity finally appears to be waking up to the havoc it has

wrought. The past decade saw the most clinching evidence ever - provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that human activity had pushed greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere to almost the tipping point. Another few decades of business as usual, and our planet will hit an irreversible slide into catastrophic climate changes, destroying civilisation as we know it today. The decade is ending with a failure to agree on an acceptable way out, but Copenhagen also marks the first glimmer of an awareness that time is running out for humanity.

The coming decade will thus be dominated by global efforts to cut emissions and change over to a life less rooted in the carbon economy. If an agreement is not reached in the next two to three years, and carbon emissions are not reduced from 2015 onwards , the target of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius by 2050 will not be achieved. Indeed, a confidential UN document that was leaked at Copenhagen shows that the world is headed towards a three degrees Celsius rise by 2050 unless the developed world takes much larger emission cuts than they have been promising so far.

Scientists are agreed that at the present level of warming, extreme weather events, rising sea levels and shrinking glaciers will increasingly become evident in the coming decade, with severe consequences for agriculture, health and the global economy.

The big hope lies in increasing use of emission-reducing technology. Reaching the 2°C target will require a broad portfolio of possible technological pathways , says Brigitte Knopf of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, who is associated with the IPCC. "There is no silver bullet of one technology that does the job. However, for ambitious mitigation targets, some technologies become very important: bio-energy use, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), and renewable energy," she told TOI-Crest .

The bill for these efforts will come to a few percentage points of global GDP. If technologies do not become available, either costs or temperature will go up, says Knopf. Several breakthroughs have been made in green technologies for automobiles, and these will get commercialised soon. A big push towards use of solar, wind and geothermal energies can also be expected.

Happily, progress has been made in containing or reversing some aspects of environmental damage in the past decade. Deforestation, which was as high as 8.9 million hectares per year in 1990-2000 , dropped to about 7.3 million hectares per year in the past decade. This has happened because of serious forestry initiatives by several countries including China, India, US and several South American countries. However, in some of the top deforestation regions like Indonesia and Brazil, the rate is still high. Deforestation contributes about a quarter of annual carbon emissions , so efforts to check it are being accorded top priority.

But there's bad news when it comes to endangered species. Advancing urbanisation, deforestation and poaching are destroying other forms of life at an alarming rate. In 2000, the Red List prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had 10,533 species listed as threatened. In 2009, this number had risen to 17,291. Several threatened animal species became extinct in the past decade, including the Baiji dolphin (China), the West African Black Rhino, the Golden Toad (Costa Rica), the Spix's Macaw (Brazil) and Po'o-uli bird (Hawaii, US). The coming decade will be a test of survival for many threatened species, including the royal Bengal tiger. It will also determine whether we can save the earth itself from devastating climate change.