Lord Bhattacharyya
Founded institute at Warwick University to energise industry
LORD BHATTACHARYYA, who has died aged 78, was a manufacturing guru at Warwick University and a driving force behind the revival of Jaguar Land Rover under Indian ownership.
Bhattacharyya was the founder, in 1980, of Warwick Manufacturing Group, a pioneering collaboration between academia and industry at a time when, as he put it, “the Japanese were beating the living daylights out of us” in manufacturing techniques – as indeed were the Germans, among other global competitors.
As a production engineer by training, with hands-on industrial experience, Bhattacharyya envisaged his new institute as a means of harnessing a range of resources to bring UK factory practice up to the most advanced standards – and imbuing financial skills in the managers who ran them. Besides degree courses, WMG has provided research and development facilities for companies such as Airbus, BAE Systems, Siemens and Glaxosmithkline as well as the auto makers whose resurgent Midlands cluster has been fertilised by proximity to Warwick.
According to legend, Bhattacharyya in his daughter’s Mini Cooper gave his friend the Indian tycoon Ratan Tata a tour of the region’s car heritage: as a result, the Tata group invested £1.5 billion in 2008 to buy Jaguar Land Rover from Ford, and invested billions more to turn the historic marques into flagships of UK export, notably into China. It was also Bhattacharyya who had helped persuade Tata to buy Corus, the Anglo-dutch owner of what remained of the British steel industry, in 2007.
A diminutive bundle of energy, ideas and opinions, Bhattacharrya was proud of his global connections, his status as mentor to a business leaders in his native India, and his role as adviser to successive UK prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher onwards. A university colleague called him “a force of nature [who] pushed at boundaries, changed lives, created jobs, and set the standard for how universities should work with industry”.
Sushantha Kumar Bhattacharyya was born on June 6 1940 at Dhaka (now in Bangladesh) and brought up at Bangalore, where his father Sudhir – from a Bengali landowning family – was professor of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science. Kumar was educated by Jesuits and took a first degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, before travelling to England in 1961 to become a graduate apprentice at Lucas Industries, the auto and aero component maker.
He went on to take an MSC and doctorate in Production Engineering at Birmingham University, where he became a lecturer in 1970. But Birmingham was unwilling to back the concept that developed into WMG – “People thought it was just a moneymaking idea,” he recalled, and there was particular scepticism about his proposal to create a hybrid of engineering and business studies. But he found the sponsor he needed in Lord (Jack) Butterworth, founding vice-chancellor of the smaller university of Warwick, to which he moved in 1980.
Most recently, WMG has been at the forefront of UK efforts to develop nextgeneration batteries for electric vehicles and other applications. Last year the university announced that its new National Automotive Innovation Centre will be named the Lord Bhattacharyya Building.
Kumar Bhattacharyya was appointed CBE in 1997 and was knighted in 2003. He became a Labour life peer the following year, but his politics were pragmatic: “I’m a cross between intervention and independence. I won’t support everything relying on government: you can’t have a long-term strategy based on that. It just won’t work if there’s no market pull.”
He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. His wife Bridie, née Rabbitt, whom he married in 1981, came from Ireland; she survives him with their three daughters.
Lord Bhattacharyya, June 6 1940, died 1 March 2019