The people's car rolls out

IT has no radio, no boot, no airbag, no passenger-side mirror and just one long windscreen wiper. And if you want air-conditioning to deal with India's summer heat you'll have to buy the deluxe version.

India's Tata Group last week pulled the covers off the world's cheapest car, the Nano, which goes on sale later this year with a price tag of 100,000 rupees to bring motoring to the country's billion-strong masses.

For 70-year-old Ratan Tata, the group's chairman, the launch of the Nano is a landmark in transport comparable to the first powered flight by the Wright brothers, or the first moonshot. But environmentalists say the new car heralds a "nightmare" of choking pollution and clogged roads.

Like a modern-day version of Henry Ford, Tata's idea is of an affordable car that is light and simple, yet made from high-quality materials. The result is a jelly bean-shaped vehicle into which five adults can squeeze. The basic model makes no concession to luxury: its price has been kept low by using more plastic than steel and swapping hi-tech glue for traditional welding.

Rival manufacturers had questioned whether the car will meet safety standards. Tata officials said the car had been designed so it could be easily strengthened with metal plates to meet tougher safety standards.

Conceived four years ago, the Nano has already revolutionised the motor industry. Days before Tata unveiled the car Ford announced it would increase spending by $500 million a year to make India a hub for "small-car manufacturing".

For now Tata remains focused on India, which analysts predict will become the fastest growing car market - overtaking China - in five years.

The "people's car" is also a realisation of the Tata chairman's long-cherished dream: to put every Indian family behind a steering wheel.

He says the thought came to him first while watching families on motorbikes travelling through dusty streets. "The father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family."

At just 100,000 rupees, excluding sales tax, the Nano is less than half the price of the next cheapest car on the road in India and a bit more than an upmarket motorcycle.

Analysts say that amid an economic boom there is a latent demand from increasingly affluent Indians trading up from a "two-wheeler" to a car. If just 10 per cent of motorcycle owners switched to Tata's Nano it would mean one million extra cars on India's roads a year.

India's mass motoring boom is already reshaping the country. Slowly cities are giving way to wide-flung suburbs.

In the case of Tata's new car, more than 1,000 acres of luxuriantly fertile fields in West Bengal's Singur district were acquired to set up the Nano plant. The factory will be able to churn out 250,000 cars a year.

Thousands of farmers who raised four crops a year have been evicted to make way for the new facility.

Last month Shankar Patra, a 50-year-old sharecropper who saw his fields turned over to the Tata plant, hanged himself in his cowshed.

"Without our fields there is no work for us. The village will die," said Patra's 22-year-old son, Pratap. "We have nothing, but the rest of India will have a new car."