BENGALURU: An interesting battle is being waged between the Congress-led state government of Karnataka and the Janata Dal (S) leader and former chief minister HD Kumaraswamy, who is now part of the ruling NDA and is the union steel and heavy industries minister – on the issue of the revival of ‘Pride of Bangalore’ the Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT), the Public Sector company that once had 90 per cent share of the wristwatch market in India.
While Kumaraswamy claims to be working out a plan to revive the HMT, which is on the verge of closure what with the domination of private players in the watch industry and due to the overall degeneration of the public sector post-liberalization, and the Karnataka government now hell-bent on recovering hundreds of acres of land that is with HMT.
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The Karnataka government, which claims it was ‘forest land’ belonging to the forest department, has issued a notice to HMT for its recovery.
Kumaraswamy, meanwhile, lashed out at the state forest minister Eshwar Khandre for his administrative note that asked the forest department to initiate measures to recover the 281 acres of land from HMT Ltd.
The Union Minister, who was in Bengaluru, opened up before media persons and questioned the intent of the Congress government. He lambasted the state government for its “stand that will kill the PSU that is in its death throes”.
“Are in we power to shut down the pride of India,” he asked the state minister asking him to shed his pettiness and help him revive HMT.
State forest minister Khandre had issued an administrative note on August 9 where he cited the June 11, 1896 gazette notification showing that 559 acres in the survey number 1 in Peenya Jalahalli in Bengaluru city was forest land. He said no records show that the land was ever gifted to HMT and added that he had initiated the recovery process.
The state minister quoted a recent Supreme Court ruling saying that once a forest land is always a forest land and added that environment is more important than civil rights.
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The forest minister asked the additional chief secretary to initiate steps to recover 281 acres of vacant land out of the 559 acres of HMT land.
This step, coming after a visit of the Union Minister to HMT with a revival plan, is aimed at scuttling the move, sources said.
Union minister Kumaraswamy lambasted the state minister saying that the entire land belonged to HMT and quoted the previous visits of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Mrs Indira Gandhi as prime ministers to the PSU in the 60s and 70s to drum up its importance for Karnataka and India as a showpiece of PSU dominance.
HMT had made a profit of Rs270 crore in 1970 and had used these to open its units outside the state – in Hyderabad, Uttarakhand, Ajmer, and Kerala.
The tractor-making unit at Pinjore was a roaring success until the TATAs came up with their company and weaned away 350 employees of HMT, leading to its downfall as a leading tractor manufacturer.
The union minister also questioned the state forest minister as to why he was silent all these years and asked him about the timing of his decision to recover the HMT land now.
The union minister, who has some 40 PSUs under his ministry, lamented that as many as 27 of them were on the verge of closure and he was trying to revive all of them.
Kumaraswamy contested the claim of the state government and said that all the land that HMT got was paid for and that the state government was not in its rights to launch a recovery process and urged the state government to cooperate with him in his efforts to revive a dying central PSU that was the pride of India not so long ago.
Main image on top: A file picture of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating HMT’s first manufacturing facility in 1962. (Source of picture: Wikipedia/windingritual.com)
