Zoharavar Khan can't stop thanking the lady who brought him luck. By driving the Nano factory from Singur in West Bengal, Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee seems to have unwittingly done hundreds of villagers, like Khan, a huge favour.
Once a small-time tea shop owner at Sanand, which is 30 km off Ahmedabad, Khan now sells over 2,000 cups a day at the Tata Nano factory site. The 60-year old resident of Kalana village, two km from the Sanand plant also supplies a few hundred kgs of ration goods every month to the workers.
Or take Purshottam, a 35-year old villager. He has quit his factory job at a nearby pigment manufacturing unit and is now a "satisfied" entrepreneur with his own paan shop near the plant.
He has also landed himself a bonus, working as a supervisor of a plot bought by an Ahmedabad-based entrepreneur, Bharat Shah, who is planning to put up a dhaba there.
The windfall gains are visible in other areas too. Local villagers have worked out two kinds of residential rental schemes for those working at the Nano factory: a Rs 2,500 to Rs 3,000 monthly rent for a place close to the plant, or Rs 1,000 at nearby villages.
A signboard is conspicuous on the new approach road to the plant: "Shanti Suman Residential Plots: opposite "Neno" plant".Land deals have also picked up in the area.
Nazir Khan, resident of Chharodi village and spouse of sarpanch Nagina Biwi, says some villagers are making a lot of money as brokerage fee in these deals. Land prices have touched Rs 30-40 lakh (Rs 3-4 million) per bigha for a plot near highway from Rs 500,000-600,000 around two years ago. Even agricultural land is quoted at Rs 500,000-600,000 per bigha.
Khan has sold around four bighas for the approach road, which was built three months ago, at Rs 25 lakh (Rs 2.5 million) per bigha. He has bought two cars that now do duty in the Nano plant's car-pool. His cousin Shamshir Khan, who sold around eight bighas for the road, is now richer by six tractors and two cars.
Meanwhile, contractors are busy building a giant main gate and are putting finishing touches to the plant, which is scheduled to roll out the first Nano next month. The vendor park, however, looks far from ready. A company spokesperson says the company has all the necessary arrangements in place to roll out the car in April. "Vendors such as Caparo, JBM, Lumax and so on, accounting for nearly 80 per cent of the value of components for the car, have also started production," he says.
Sources among the vendors, on the other hand, say they will go slow on starting on-site production after burning their fingers in Singur.
A senior official in a leading vendor company that is supplying at least six crucial components for the car including the chassis says, "The vendor park should attract Rs 1,500 crore (Rs 15 billion) to Rs 2,000 crore (Rs 20 billion) worth of investment if all the 56 vendors come in. As of now it is less than 20 per cent complete. People can wait till volumes touch over 500 cars per day."
Most vendors have worked out make-shift arrangements inside the Nano plant to feed the assembly line.
All this means Tata Motors' dream of a just-in-time delivery system will take more time to work out.
The Sanand plant started trial production in December last year and will ramp up production from 65 to 70 cars per day to around 200 cars per day within a couple of months. Currently, the company's Pantnagar line in Uttarakhand produces 200 Nanos per day while the Pune plant is supplying the engines to Pantnagar. The main paint shop at the Sanand site is likely to be ready by July. A smaller, temporary paint shop is in place.
However, there are some murmurs of discontent among a section of the villagers. A few of them appealled in the Gujarat High Court against the land deal between the state government and Tata Motors. Abdul from Kalana village says many of them will have to part with their land as the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation plans to acquire 2,200 hectares of agricultural land for an industrial estate.
Also, there is unhappiness over the fact that Tata Motors has not employed villagers who have been trained to drive cars and obtained driving licences. While some have been employed as contract workers by the vendors and the construction people at the site, no one has been employed directly by the carmaker.
"We are unsure about to what is next. Most villagers here are into wheat cultivation, and if GIDC tries to acquire land, our future would be uncertain," Abdul says.
Tata Motors says it is confident of sorting out these problems soon. After the Banerjee effect at Singur, the minor discontent at Sanand is small change indeed.
