Ground-breaking for Maruti's new plant in Gujarat in early 2013

Maruti Suzuki will start the ground-breaking of its new manufacturing facility at Gujarat early this year. Construction is slated to kick off soon after, chairman R C Bhargava told Autocar Professional.

The carmaker has, on its own steam, recently acquired another 500 acres of private land that belongs to farmers and another 100 acres are in the process of acquisition. This land is located about 40km from the first location in Mehsana. Earlier about 640 acres of land in Mehsana district had been given by the government to Maruti for its new manufacturing facility in Gujarat that will entail an investment of over Rs 4,000 crore.

Bhargava says that the company’s component vendors will require another 300-400 acres of land in the vendor’s park with the Japan External Trade Organisation (JETRO) believed to be also setting up a Japanese cluster in the vicinity.

The proposed Japanese cluster, spearheaded by JETRO, has already been given about 1,500 acres in the Becharji-Sanand belt where the new production facilities of Maruti Suzuki and Ford India are coming up. The state government is also believed to be keen to set up another auto cluster in this region. “The second location is for our future expansion. Once we exhaust the capacity at the first site,

we will move to the second one. Maruti requires around 1,000 acres of land for its requirements. The rest of the land can be utilised by the vendors,” says Bhargava.

He agrees that with new Japanese component suppliers coming to India and setting up base in Gujarat, some of the pressure on imported components would be eased off. Natural disasters in Japan two years ago had put the pressure on Maruti to look out for alternative vendors in India to source some critical parts.

Bhargava is not very optimistic of the India market experiencing any major improvement in 2013-14 with Maruti growing at around 6-7 percent. The carmaker expects to close the current fiscal with a sales growth of around 6 percent over 2010-11.

SHOBHA MATHUR