The first Nano – the world’s cheapest car – is expected to roll out of the Tata Group’s Rs 2,000 crore (Rs 20 billion/$3.86 billion) Sanand plant in Gujarat by end 2010, company officials said on Monday.
Work is on at full swing at the project site in Sanand, about 45 km from Ahmedabad, with the construction of plant buildings using pre-engineered steel structures for the ancillary units spread in an area of 65,000 square metres already underway.
Ahmedabad-based pre-engineered steel structure building manufacturer Phenix Varco Pruden had been given the Rs 50 crore (Rs 500 million/$9.66 million) contract for constructing the paint shop and the ancillary plant buildings. The entire work is targeted to be completed by end of this month (March 2009), the officials said.
Nearly 4,000 tonnes of steel components would be used in the construction of the buildings, which are designed with a heavy load bearing capacity with a mainframe structure supporting the entire load. The ancillary plants would be of various sizes as different units would have specific kind of requirements, the officials said.
The work of shifting the various components of the unfinished plant at Singur in West Bengal would take almost a year given the the distance involved and the complex nature of the machinery and the plant components to be dismantled from the Singur site where the company had invested close to Rs 1,500 crore (Rs 15 billion/$2.9 billion), the officials added.
Tata had announced shifting of the Nano project site from West Bengal October 2008 following the campaign launched by Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress against the setting up of the small car project at Singur. The Tata Group finally zeroed on Gujarat after evaluating the possibility of setting up the plant for the small car in Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
The Narendra Modi government allocated 1,100 acres of land at Sanand, close to national highway number 8 which goes to the Kandla, Mundhra and Dholera ports. The Nano plant in Sanand is expected to produce 250,000 cars per annum.