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Ashok Leyland, and a Forty-Six-Year Fight Over a Gearbox Plant

Ashok Leyland's decades-long dispute over a small parcel of forest-classified land at its Bhandara gearbox plant highlights the complexities of industrial land acquisition, regulatory approvals, and infrastructure expansion in India's automotive manufacturing sector.

By Shahkar Abidi

14 Jul 2026

69979 Views

Ashok Leyland, and a Forty-Six-Year Fight Over a Gearbox Plant

On June 25, a general manager named Rajendra Chandrashekhar Thakare signed his name beneath a company seal in Gadegaon, a village in Maharashtra's Bhandara district, and sent a filing to India's forest bureaucracy.

Ashok Leyland Limited, the country's second-largest maker of commercial vehicles, formally asked the government's regional forest office to let it keep 3.65 hectares of land, roughly nine acres, a plot one could walk across in a few unhurried minutes, on which it had already been operating, in some cases for more than forty years. Moreover, the company was not asking for more land, having ...

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