JAGUAR, LAND ROVER SAY HELLO TO TATA

01-09-2007

Indian motor manufacturer Tata has confirmed its interesting in buying West Midland car firms Land Rover and Jaguar from Ford. Barbara Panvel is less than impressed.

I feel very uneasy at reports of Tata's wish to acquire Land Rover and Jaguar.

Apart from concern over possible job losses, it is unpleasant to see a firm coming into the country which has been responsible for displacing many thousands of poor Indian small-holders whose fertile land will be used for industrial purposes, in a country with large empty tracts of less fertile land available.

Tata enlists the help of the police to quell demonstrations from people who are losing their homes and livelihoods in a country which does not have social security, killing 12 tribal people on the site of a Tata steel plant in 2006.

Violence has also been committed against protestors deprived of homes and land for a Tata car factory.

Ratan Tata has a dream to build the cheapest small car in the world, but when Tapasi Mali, a teenager who was involved in the struggle to stop Tata taking her family's land, was found butchered only yards from her home on the Tata site, Peter Popham - reporting this gruesome death in The Independent - asked: "is the price of his vision too high?"

Similarly we should ask if we are so desperate for foreign investment that we welcome, as partners or employers, firms who are behaving in this way to people in their own country.

(See also "Ta Ta To Steel Jobs")

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