Forced to move out of singur, Tata Motors have decided to locate its small car project at sanand in Gujarat's Ahmedabad district. This agreement of 2000 crore was signed between themon oct 7th 2008.Tata has been allocated 1100 acres chharodi and charal villages, just 25 km from Ahmedabad.Mr.Tata said that the deal was "better" then what was offered by WB govt.
'Nano' may mean 'small' in Gujarati but dreams are getting BIG in Gujarat. Not even a free-falling Sensex could dampen the mood of the scrip-savvy Gujarati, a day after the momentous turn Tata's Nano took from Singur to Sanand. From college student to the rickshawalla, from business barons to toiling farmers, from the Congress to the BJP, everybody is talking about the Nano in positive terms. People are trying to figure out how Nano would change their life for the better and they are already sniffing out for opportunities to ride the Nano wave.
Comparisons with Singur are rather unnecessary, given Gujarat's long history of untiring enterprise. This state does not have a poor-will-never-gain-anything kind of thought even among the poor. Plus, it has a chief minister in Narendra Modi, who models Gujarat after Singapore and has reinforced the already-firm belief in Goddess Laxmi being the panacea for all ills. He believes that if you have the mega-bucks you can also improve the human development index (HDI) where Gujarat, despite its industrialisation, is a laggard, dragged down by poor health and education infrastructure. He wants Ahmedabad, despite its troubled communal past, to become a showpiece of his vision and rival other metros and mega-cities in all respects. For Tatas, they couldn't have given a better gift than Nano to Namo - as Modi is endearingly called in Gujarat by his fans - on the day he completed seven years in office.
But Tatas have come here by force, not by choice, It is one thing that Modi served them all the land they required on a platter and with a speed much more than 50 mph which Nano promises. But from the high-risk misadventure in West Bengal, where they ran into a political landmine, they have opted for a state which qualifies as the safest bet for investments. It may not have communal peace, but the state can certainly guarantee industrial peace and friendly trade unions. No political party even would want to oppose investments in business-friendly Gujarat.
Though Congress, which is the only relevant opposition here, may not like Nano becoming the Kohinoor in Modi's crown, it knows it can oppose Nano only at the peril of getting another backlash from Gujarati voters. While land has become such a huge issue in other parts of the country, industry is quietly chipping away at thousands of acres of farmland across Gujarat for manufacturing, including the massive acquisition for 60 SEZs cleared for Gujarat. Willing farmers in Gujarat may not even want any political support which, as the sordid Singur story showed, pushed Ratan Tata into Modi's waiting bear-hug.
How AP lost race for Tata car:
The inability of the Andhra Pradesh government to show good land sites to the Tata team in short notice and the fact that bagging the proj ect did not have high stakes for chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy as it had for his Gujarat counterpart Narendra Modi were the reasons why the state lost the Nano project.
Stating these two to be the main reasons for AP losing out, state government officials said the minor protest by farmers at Sitarampur village in Ranga Reddy district on Sunday could also have a contributory role. “In the end, bagging the project would not mean much to YSR as it did for Modi. Hence, the state did not go out of its way to woo them,” said one official. According to sources, it was only on Saturday at around 3 pm that Tata Motors MD Ravi Kant called up AP officials and informed them of his decision to visit Hyderabad the next day. He also told them that they were interested in inspecting land that was within 50 km radius of Hyderabad.
As a result, we had less that 24 hours to identify government land for them,” said the official. But the sites at Sitarampur in RR and Wargal in Medak districts were entirely government land and was immediately available for the Tatas. “The Tata team had expressed concern over the contours of the site at Sitarampur, implying that they had to do a lot of levelling before undertaking construction of the plant. In contrast, Modi had got the agriculture university land near Ahmedabad levelled two days ago and had it ready to be handed over in a platter for the Tatas,” said the official.
By Monday, when Tata Motors senior general manager M B Kulkarni visited the Wargal site, they had already decided on Gujarat. “They were only going through the exercise. In fact, they were ordering material for the Gujarat location while en route to Wargal. By the evening, we realised that the project is lost,” one official said. According to the sources, Ratan Tata called up the chief minister on Monday evening and conveyed his decision to opt out of AP. “Rajasekhara Reddy too did not try to persuade him to change his mind as landing the project was not that big an issue for him,” said a senior official.
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