Peugeot in driver’s seat, but Ambassador’s Uttarpara plant workers have little to cheer
BENGAL): The Ambassador brand is changing hands, but at the factory that once built the iconic car, there is little hope of a second life.
“Will they not come back to Uttarpara?” asked Binod Singh, one of the 600-odd workers at the factory in the Kolkata suburb where Hindustan Motors Ltd (HM) manufactured the car till 2014.
On Friday, HM announced an agreement with Groupe PSA, the maker of Citroen and Peugeot cars, to sell the Ambassador brand along with all its goodwill for ₹80 crore. The announcement fuelled speculation that the car might be brought back to life.
Over the weekend, the French firm said it hasn’t decided on products and brands to be launched in India. Groupe PSA has agreed to form a joint venture with HM’s promoter, the CK Birla group, to manufacture cars in India for local needs.
The venture, in which Groupe PSA will hold 80%, will manufacture cars in Tamil Nadu. The CK Birla group has a car assembly facility in Chennai, which was once a part of HM and has now been carved out and is held under Hindustan Motors Finance Ltd.
“We have not yet decided on the products we will launch in India,” said Pierre-Olivier Salmon, head of corporate information at Groupe PSA. “The partnership between Groupe PSA and the CK Birla group will benefit from the Ambassador brand.”
An HM spokesperson in an email said it continues to “explore opportunities” with potential partners to revive manufacturing at Uttarpara, and that the Ambassador deal will help pay off workers’ dues and settle liabilities with lenders.
But the likes of Singh had expected more from the sale of the Ambassador, which, in their view, can still be revived.
The Ambassador failed to keep pace with competition and was withdrawn at a time when its demand even as a taxi on the roads of Kolkata was almost gone. That happened when the administration lifted restrictions on registration of other cars as taxis.
At Uttarpara, the homes in HM’s worker colonies have not had power connections for two years. Some 350 families still live in company residences, said Shashibhusan Rai, who joined in 1997 as a contract worker after his father, a permanent worker, died.
The management is pressuring workers to leave with a compensation of ₹1 lakh each, claimed Digvijay Singh, who refused to accept the severance package previously offered under a voluntary retirement scheme. “Even water comes to our homes in a trickle, and only for one hour, whereas the company had committed that we will receive water for at least three hours a day.”
But the biggest concern for people is law and order. Machines are being routinely stolen from the factory, claimed Rai.
For him and others at Uttarpara, there’s still no dawn in sight even with the Ambassador driving into the stable of a revived French automobile giant.