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Activists to lay siege to India’s Nano car factory

Tata chairman Ratan Tata speaks at a press conference in Kolkata, India, on Friday. PHOTO: AFP

Police yesterday surrounded the Indian plant scheduled to produce the world’s cheapest car as activists prepared for a siege protest aimed at forcing Tata Motors to return the site to local farmers.

At least 200,000 people were expected to join the protest in Singur, 35km northwest of the state capital Kolkata, activists said.

“Security has been tightened in and around Tata’s small car project. More than 4,000 policemen have been deployed,” said Raj Kanojia, police chief of West Bengal state, where Singur is located.

The gates of factory, which is still under construction, have been fenced off, Kanojia said, as concern mounted over an October deadline for the first of the US$2,500 Nano cars to be produced.

On Friday, Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata, whose Tata Motors is India’s top vehicle-maker, warned he would move the plant out of the state if the demonstrations kept up, although his company has invested US$350 million in the project.

“I’d like to assert the project will be a reality. Nobody can obstruct it.”

— Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, West Bengal chief minister

Indian states vied at the weekend to offer alternative sites.

Prosperous Punjab invited Tata to make the northern state its home for manufacturing the Nano, promising “all possible facilities” for the mini-car.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh pledged a “red carpet welcome” in the wealthy state, while poverty-hit Orissa state offered “all kinds of support.”

Activists at Singur say they will only call off protests if the government hands back 160 hectares forcibly taken from farmers, who have not accepted any compensation.

But West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, whose communist-controlled government wooed the project, insisted that the row would be settled.

“I’d like to assert the project will be a reality,” Bhattacharjee said late on Saturday. “Nobody can obstruct it.”

Tensions were high yesterday across West Bengal, which has often been at the forefront of recent battles over land rights in India.

The struggles have pitted the interests of farmers who say they will starve without their land against those of business and India’s government, which say the country needs to industrialize rapidly.

For more than two years, the Tata factory site has seen protests by activists and villagers who say many farmers were forced to part with their land.

At Nandigram village, where the state government acquired land for a petrochemical hub, police in March last year shot dead 14 farmers opposing the move.
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