Gujarat Government Offers 1,000 Acres To Tesla To Set Up Plant in State: Report

With Elon Musk’s electric vehicle-making company Tesla gearing up to enter the Indian market, several states are competing to offer them lucrative deals to get the premium company to set up their base in that state. The latest to join that race is Gujarat, which has offered nearly 1,000 acres of land in Mundra on the Kutch coast to the premium company, The Indian Express reported. Other states that are vying to win the American company over are Maharashtra and Karnataka, all on India’s west coast.

Being coastal states, all three states offer Tesla an easy link to West Asian and African markets, but the company has made no announcement so far where it is going to base itself in India. However, the latest offer by the Gujarat government has come months after the carmaker set up its India office by registering the firm in Bengaluru.

Shortly after that, Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa said Tesla would set up an R&D unit in Karnataka. He later deleted the tweet. In February, Yediyurappa again said that Tesla would open a manufacturing unit in Karnataka.

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Now, Gujarat has offered 1,000 acres both inside and outside Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone in Mundra, which is also home to the largest private port in India. A Gujarat government official told the Express that they have informed Tesla that land will not be an issue, but they seem to be undecided whether the new unit will be purely for exports or a mix of both. The official also said that the Tesla officials are also not sure if they should set up a base at a faraway place in Gujarat or stay in Bengaluru.

“There is little or no social life in Gujarat, while it is not so in Bengaluru," the official said.

P Anbalagan, the chief executive officer of the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation, told the daily that Tesla officials have had four rounds of negotiations with the state government; the last one around 8 months ago and since then there has been no further development there as well.

Tesla officials sought a big web of charging stations in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and also near the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, the port where the cars would land following imports, he said.

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