Sir Jehangir Jivaji Ghandy, was born on November 18, 1896, at Bombay, his father Jivaji Dinshaw Ghandy being a Solicitor of repute, and a Director of Tata Sons Limited and several other Tata Companies.

He was educated at the New High School and at St. Xavier’s and Wilson Colleges, Bombay, taking his B.A. with Honours in Physics and Chemistry and B.Sc. (Chemistry Hons.) in 1916 and 1917 respectively.

After graduating, Sir Jehangir went to Jamshedpur in 1917 - and the association between the man and the place was to continue uninterrupted for 55 years! He joined Tata Steel for practical training when the capacity of the plant was about 100,000 tons of steel per year. The following year he left for the U.S. for studies in business administration as well as in Metallurgical and Steel Works Engineering. He returned three years later to rejoin Tata Steel and a systematic climb in responsibility led to his being the first Indian General Manager of the Tata Steel plant in 1938. He piloted the Company through the years of the Depression and in 1954, as Director-in-Charge of the Tata Iron and Steel Company, he participated in expanding its capacity to two million tons per annum.

His role in Tata's industrial enterprises became closer with his appointments to the Boards of Tata Industries in 1945, the year he was knighted, and of the parent firm of Tata Sons in 1959. Sir Jehangir's interest in industry went beyond the making of steel and he was one of the first of the new breed of technocrats who saw the steel industry only as the base of a growing mushroom of industrial and engineering activity. His managerial talents and technological capabilities were made available to the Nation through several committees and official bodies like the National Metallurgical Laboratory, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Central Fuel Research Institute, the Indian Institute   of   Technology   and   the Administrative Staff College.

His achievements were recognised and acknowledged abroad too where he was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Fuel and an Honorary Member of the Iron and Steel Institute, both of Great Britain. As a technocrat, he was among the first to recognise the need for adopting some standards and achieving some standardisation in Indian industry, and was appointed Vice-President of the Indian Standards Institution and Chairman of its Executive Committee and Structural Metals Division Council. He was the first Asian to be elected President of the International Organisation for Standardisation in 1964.

The Chairman, J.R.D. Tata and the Vice-Chairman, S. Moolgaokar, rightly observed that Sir Jehangir did more for Jamshedpur than any other man, for he laid the secure foundations on which most of the Jamshedpur Companies rose to their present size and stature. Sir Jehangir's attention, however, went far beyond the Steel City of Jamshedpur and encompassed the entire State of Bihar and the rest of the country. He was a member of the Bihar Industrial Development Council and the Orissa Industrial Development Committee.

He was also Chairman of the Heavy Engineering Committee set up by the Government of India to assess the British and Soviet teams' reports for establishing India's heavy industries, and was an architect of India's entry into large-scale steel production by arranging for the orientation course in Jamshedpur and the subsequent training in the United States for about 1,000 Indian engineers for the Public Sector steel plants.

Despite his dazzling achievements in industry, Sir Jehangir was relatively free of the hubris of technique and was among the first to acknowledge that, despite all the technological progress and scientific development, man indeed was the core of all industry. Behind a facade, at times of sternness, his outlook towards his workers and working colleagues was always warm-hearted and kind. Out of this enlightenment, he became deeply involved in institutions like the Xavier Labour Relations Institute, "the Institute awards a Gold Medal in his honour every year for outstanding contributions to industrial peace”.

Sir Jehangir was one of those who built up Jamshedpur and who deeply loved the Steel City. He never left it for very long and his personality was impressed upon its industrial and community life. Few persons are fortunate enough to have such tangible and outstanding monuments to their life's work as Sir Jehangir Ghandy.

Sir Jehangir was made a C.I.E. in 1941 and knighted in 1945. He was made an Honorary Lt. Col. in the Territorial Army in 1952 and an Honorary Colonel in April 1957.