Dear comrade,

Apparently Tata has fallen off the SIngur wall and his ‘dream’ of offering a ‘cheap’ car to the masses of India may take some more time now. All the sops offered by the comrades of Writer’s building could not put his pie together again! But do the masses of India know what these sops were? In fact, though Tata has filed a petition in the Calcutta high court trying to restrain the State Information Commission from releasing details about the Tata Nano car project to the public, the following facts have already come to light:

• The West Bengal government had given a 2000 million rupee loan to Tata Motors at 1% (yes, one percent!) interest p.a. to the group which bought the British steel company Corus for 350,000 million rupees!
• The first instalment of this loan was to be repaid in the 21st year of the project - which means that by the time this instalment becomes due, Tata motors could have earned Rs 20,000 million merely by investing this in a fixed deposit at today’s rates!
• Tata Motors was to pay only Rs 10 million per year as lease rent for 647 acres of land – working out to about Rs 1,300 per acre – the commercial market rates for land at similar locations near Calcutta are at least 5 times as much!
• Tata Motors was to get power at Rs 3.00 per kilo watt hour – while the prevailing rate in West Bengal is Rs 4.15; moreover the state government was supposed to refund Tata Motors if the rate were to go up by more than 25 paise per kilo watt hour in 3 years!
• For every car sold in Bengal, the state government was to refund VAT and sales tax collected!

All this (and there is more not yet disclosed) makes it clear that Tata was really being helped to rob the state exchequer, i.e. money belonging to the toiling people of Bengal and India, in order to provide them with a so - called ‘cheap car’. It remains to be seen which state government will succeed the comrades of Writers Building in falling head over heels to offer better sops to the Tatas!

Comradely yours,
Kumaran, Gurgaon