Kolkata: India’s largest truck and bus maker, Tata Motors Ltd, will return the 1,000 acres of land in Singur that was leased to it for building a car factory, provided it is compensated for the investment it made to develop the site, Ratan Tata said.
Tata Motors decided to pull the plug on its small-car factory in Singur in West Bengal’s Hooghly district in October last year due to violent local protests against the forcible seizure of land by the state government.
“Tata Motors has no plan to invest on that land at present, but we are willing to co-operate for anything that suits the state of West Bengal and its people,” Tata said after meeting the state’s commerce and industries minister Nirupam Sen on Tuesday.
“We don’t like to sit on land which is unused… If they compensate us for the investment we have put on the ground, we will consider,” Tata said about returning the land. The amount the auto maker has spent on the Singur site isn’t known; it hasn’t named a figure. According to an official of West Bengal Industrial Development Corp. Ltd, the state government arm that was to facilitate the small car project, the firm had spent around Rs300 crore to develop the site. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak to the media.
Some companies looking to set up factories in West Bengal have shown interest in taking over the Singur land, but Tata said he hadn’t received any firm proposal from the state government.