Maharashtra Making Strong Bid For Fiat Palio Project

Though a Premier source indicated that the Palio project is likely to be situated in Maharashtra, the state government does not want to leave anything to chance, especially in the backdrop of the recent loss of Mahindra-Ford's Fiesta project to Tamil Nadu.

In the Mahindra-Ford project, it is believed that it was the American company that favoured Tamil Nadu as the project site. The investment think-tank in the government does not want a repeat of that, with Premier proposing Maharashtra and Fiat disposing it.

A few key members of the Maharashtra government are, however, in Israel wooing investment there under the aegis of the Jagatik Marathi Parishad, in which chief minister Manohar Joshi and former chief minister Sharad Pawar are vice-president and president.

 

"It has become a sort of prestige issue that Maharashtra should bag the project. We do not want to be stranded as during the Mahindra-Ford project,'' a senior official in the state government said.

Analysing the loss of the Fiesta project to Tamil Nadu, he said that the corporate decision arose out of the fact that all the Mahindra's plants were in Maharashtra.

"The general fear was that in case of a labour trouble in one of the plants it could spread to the other plants and hence Ford decided to insulate its project by takiing it to Tamil Nadu,'' he said.

According to a senior official in Sicom, which works as a promotional agency to attract investments in the state, ``Fiat's fears are labour-related. And one supposes they cannot be blamed for that. But what assurance can we give on that front?'' The obvious reference is to the ongoing and prolonged lock-out in the Premier-Fiat Uno factory in Kurla.

"We will offer the same tax incentives and good infrastructure to the company wherever it wants to set up the project," said a top government official.

Areas in and around Pune--especially Ranjangaon--have emerged as a major automobile manufacturing hub, what with Telco, Bajaj Auto, Kinetic, Bajaj Tempo and Mercedes well-entrenched there.

But during recent times, space in Ranjangaon is becoming scarce with white good manufacturers like Matsushita, Daewoo Electronics and Whirlpool flooding the industrial township.