For Hind Motors the Uttarpara facility, which manufactures Ambassadors, is no longer the key to survival. It now has plants at Indore, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, where it makes engines, transmissions and their components, and automatic transmissions and their parts. It supplies these parts to the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers. In its own product stable, it has a plant in Tamil Nadu that makes the Mitsubishi Lancer and Pajero. For the sprawling Uttarpara complex itself, HM has plans to set up auto components and information technology parks — a diversification move that also involves real estate development on the prime Uttarpara factory land.

With Indian roads having been invaded by various local and foreign brands, the Ambassador is no longer the king it once was — in fact, not even in the government sector, where a white Ambassador had been for decades the only vehicle used. Old timers recall how in the mid-’70s, when the Indian government raised petrol prices following the global oil shock, the then Congress government of Siddhartha Shankar Ray in West Bengal set up the Naba Gopal Das Commission to look into how HM could be saved. It had recommended that, since state had no control over petroleum prices, the government should ensure that there were enough orders for the Ambassador. Ray, in turn, convinced Indira Gandhi to give the Ambassador a monopoly. That was how the Ambassador came to account for a big segment of government orders.

But the days of such protection are over. One of West Bengal government’s recent orders for official cars favoured the Toyota or Scorpio over the Ambassador. At its peak, HM produced 20,000 Ambassadors a year with a workforce of 17,000, in the mid-eighties. But that era has ended. Presently HM’s workforce is in the region of 4,500, after a series of voluntary retirement schemes were offered to workers.

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