In an attempt to reduce costs, India's biggest wine producer, Indage Vintners, has started closing its regional offices, while centralising all sales and marketing activities at its headquarters in Mumbai.
Zahir Haq lost his farmland to the Nano factory, but still applied for a car, when bookings for the Tata Motors Rs 1 lakh car opened at Singur on April 9. And he is not alone: an appreciable number of Singur residents booked the Nano through the bank branches in the area, with the State Bank of India branch as the nodal point.
Locals -- more so in the area broadly called Nandigram lying across the minor Haldi River from Haldia -- fear a fresh round of land acquisition, as the state government pushes ahead with its petroleum, chemical and petrochemical investment region plans with Indian Oil Corporation and Calc Refinery Ltd as its anchor tenants. The PCPIR is one of the Left Front government's showcase projects in its efforts to accelerate growth in the state.
The 997-acre plot in Singur handed over by the West Bengal government to Tata Motors is likely to remain in the hands of the company and can be returned only after a year or so.
The company is also mulling to enter the currency futures space through the exchange. Recently, the Securities and Exchange Board of India had issued guidelines for SME exchange, and had set a minimum net worth criteria of Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion) for entity willing to start it.
mjunction services, one of the largest e-commerce companies promoted by Steel Authority of India and Tata Steel, has shelved its initial public offering plan after Tata Steel indicated it would back the management team for its future expansion plans.
Sources in the West Bengal government's finance department said the state had made budgetary provisions that would run into several hundred crores every year for 20 to 30 years to attract Tata Motors' Nano project to Singur.
The West Bengal government's new compensation package for 'unwilling' farmers in Singur, 40km from Kolkata, might have been praised by Tata Motors, but those involved in land transactions in the area find the offer inadequate.
The surprisingly strong opposition to land acquisition in Singur and earlier events at Nandigram, where local protests forced the government to scrap plans for a chemical hub, have induced investors keen on acquiring land in West Bengal to come up with compensation packages that can only be described as extravagant.
"My life has been full of interesting people", Rama Prasad Goenka tells Business Standard when asked about memories of an era when the open Indian economy was converted into a closed one based on the licence raj by the person whom he openly idolises, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Even as Tata Motors is racing against time to get its new Singur plant near Kolkata ready for commercial roll-out of the Nano by October 2008, the company may need an out-of-the-box solution to overcome some delays in the integrated plant and component park structure proposed for the vehicle.
The dissent against the Tata Motors Rs 1 lakh car project at Singur appears to be finally ebbing with the disputed land being reduced to 120 acres vis--vis the earlier level of 330 acres.
It is no coincidence that most of the willing land sellers are non-tribals who own plots to the south-west of Torpa on the road leading to the town of Simdega, where the highway crosses the Koel and Karo rivers.
Torpa is looking for a second chance to migrate from a poor village to a modern urban cluster but tension is building between those who want development and those against it. For two decades, National Hydel Power Corporation (NHPC) proposed, and some local tribal groups opposed, the setting up of the Koel-Karo hydro-electric project there, and it was finally abandoned last year.
It's clear why Nayachara is the place now being favoured by the West Bengal government. Besides being sparsely populated (700-odd according to the highest government estimates), this is a community that is not "supposed to be here" and, therefore, presumably easy to shift out.
Kolkata Port Trust, the second largest port authority in the country, would be going in for a complete revamp of its operations in its drive to raise productivity.
Logistics infrastructure in India is poor, hindering the 3PL industry's progress.
The government will draw up FDI guidelines for minor investors and set up an exclusive park for overseas units.
Chennai is vibrant with activity across all sectors but demand from the information technology sector was emerging as the key factor driving demand and leading to a visible increase in the real estate activity.
The minister said he was against "blanket privatisation of the railway system but the private sector was being encouraged to participate with the railways in the development of its non-core activities."
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