NANO GETS A STATE WELCOME S Kalyana Ramanathan & Dilip Kumar Satapathy / Chennai/bhubaneshwar September 4, 2008, 0:28 IST Tata Motors' Singur debacle is not the first of its kind for the $60 billion group that is often referred to as 'nation builders'. When Tata Motors announced late last evening that it was suspending work at Singur and looking for alternate locations to make the Nano car, it added one more to a long list of projects suspended mostly due to differences with one government or another. Though not actually suspended the Rs 2500 crore Titanium project in the coastal town of Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu hangs in limbo for nearly a year now. This project that envisages to mine for titanium-di-oxide (pigment from this mineral has a wide range of applications from making aircrafts to toothpastes) is waiting for procuring 10,000 acres of land. Tata Steel has not been unable to do this for want of clear land deeds and the Tamil Nadu government is not budging to acquire land for Tatas. Tata Steel officials had earlier indicated that they will not be able to wait indefinitely given that the same mineral is available in Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. In July this year, Tata Group had scrapped four projects in Bangladesh including a 1000 MW gas-fired power plant, a 500 MW coal based power plant and plans to make one million tonnes of fertilizer and 2.4 million tonnes of steel in Ishwardi. The estimated value of these projects were close to $4 billion. Since Bangladesh government could not provide the requisite natural gas for these projects they had been abandoned. Much before all of this, Tata Group attempted to bid for a 40 per cent stake in national carrier Air India and had tried to rope in Singapore as a consortium partner. This move and also the group's plans to enter the domestic air space with Singapore Airlines were quashed by the government. Though certain private airlines in India were rumored to be behind the government's action, Tata Group's airline project never quite took off after that. Perhaps the worst is in Orissa. In the last two decades the Eastern state has lost as many as three Tata Group projects. In 1995 Tata Steel had announced to set up a 10 million tonne steel plant at Gopalpur at an estimated cost of Rs 20,000 crore. The project was to be set up in four phases of 2.5 million tonne each over a period of six years. However, due to stiff resistance by the local people at Gopalpur, which saw death of two people in police firing, the land acquisition process got inordinately delayed. Though the company was able to acquire 2800 acres out of its requirement of 3000 acres by 1999, it still did not go ahead with the project. It finally announced shelving of the project in 2000 citing delay in land acquisition as one of the causes. The other causes, it attributed for pulling out of the project, included lack of water facility, infrastructure bottlenecks like delay in Gopalpur port construction and railway linkage between the plant and mine site. The land acquired by the Tata at Gopalpur is lying vacant and the company proposes to set up a multi-product SEZ there. Before the Gopalpur fiasco, Tatas had burnt their finger in the Chilka prawn culture project. In early Ninties, Tata Steel, under the leadership of Russi Modi, had announced a Rs 100 crore project for prawn farming at Chilka lake. However, the project was later abandoned following resistance by the environmentalists. Similarly, Tata Sons had teamed up with Indal and Norsk Hydro, also in early Ninties, to set up a one million tonne Rs 4000 crore alumina refinery at Kashipur in Rayagada district under the banner of Utkal Alumina International Ltd (UAIL). However the project could not take off due to stiff resistance from locals to the land acquisition process. Finally in late 90s Tata Sons and Norsk Hydro withdrew from the project and the venture, which is now fully owned by Hindalco, subsequent to their takeover of Indal, is yet to make any progress due to local resistance.