Biography | PB Balaji — Jaguar Land Rover Put Him in Charge at This Gate

On 4 August 2025 Tata Motors announced that P. B. Balaji would become chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover from November, succeeding Adrian Mardell.

Mardell had run JLR for three years and had spent thirty-five years at the company.

Reuters carried the appointment the same day.

A later Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles directors' report fixed the handover date: Balaji resigned as group CFO with effect from 17 November 2025.

JLR's own media biography says he took the CEO seat that November.

He had already sat on the JLR board as a non-executive director since 7 December 2017, the month he arrived as Tata Motors group CFO.

Gaydon is the place the title points to.

The Advanced Product Creation Centre on Banbury Road, Lighthorne Heath, Warwickshire, is JLR's engineering and design headquarters, built on a former wartime airfield.

Bennetts Associates completed the timber-roofed hall in 2019.

It pulled design, engineering and production purchasing under one roof for the first time in the company's history.

The visitor entrance on Banbury Road is the public threshold.

The site itself is a working development centre, not a museum.

Balaji arrived as the first Indian CEO of the Jaguar and Land Rover business under Tata ownership.

The company was already mid-transition: electric Range Rover programmes, a reset of Jaguar, tariffs in the United States, and a 2025 cyber incident that stopped production.

Those pressures belong to the job, not to a single afternoon at this gate.

What can be pinned here is the appointment itself.

A mechanical graduate of IIT Madras, a Unilever trainee from 1993, a Tata Motors CFO from 2017, walked into the CEO role of a British carmaker from this Warwickshire campus in November 2025.

Photo: Iscream icecream, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons