Asked if the company was looking to export the car as well, Tata said: “The first two-three years our focus will be India and see the Indian market appropriately addressed.” He did not, however, rule out an overseas launch of the car.

Tata revealed what enabled it to cut down costs and score over the entire global auto industry. “We took the standard Maruti 800 as the base model and worked backwards on how we can reduce costs. We decided and found out that a tight package, that will mean a smaller, meaner car, lighter engine and higher fuel economy will do the trick,” Tata said. “The decision to make it a rear engine driven was precisely to reduce the length of the car.”

But why did other car makers miss the trick? “I cannot say for others but what is important is whether you have desire strong enough to prevent the odds from overwhelming you,” Tata said.

At the site of the plant in Singur, West Bengal, where the first Nano will roll out, it is a race against time. Over 2500 people have been working in two shifts behind a guarded perimeter to complete the factory in time. Soon another shift will be introduced to make up for any backlog in work caused during the last heavy monsoon.

“Work will soon start in three shifts. Over 75 per cent work of the factory is complete and we hope by September of this year the first car will roll out of the factory,”’ a top official of West Bengal Industrial Development Corp (WBIDC) told The Indian Express. A major portion of the work involving the setting up of a 230 KV substation on the project site to ensure uninterrupted power supply to the factory and the vendor park has almost been completed by ABB.

... contd.