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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

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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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