Joint ventures were signed with great vigour and enthusiasm. Premier Automobiles with Peugeot and a technical tieup with Fiat Auto; Hindustan Motors (part of the CK Birla group of companies) with General Motors and later with Mitsubishi; Mahindra & Mahindra with Ford; DCM with Daewoo; Shriram Industrial Enterprises with Honda; Telco with none other than Daimler Benz and others.

Today, most of the partnerships are no longer in existence and in the case of one joint venture, PAL-Peugeot, the foreign partner has packed up andleft the country. The 60:40 venture between Honda and SIEL is today 90 per cent in favour of Honda; Daewoo has bought out DCM's stake and today Daewoo Motor India is on its own; Premier Automobiles's Kurla business in Mumbai was recently spun off as a separate joint venture with Fiat with the latter holding the majority stake; Telco's stake in Mercedes-Benz India is today down to less than 26 per cent and it is, for all practical purposes, out of the venture. And more recently, M&M announced that it was freezing all investment in Mahindra Ford.

All this in a mere four years during which it is amply clear that the Indian partner has practically no role in a car project with a strong international counterpart. His expertise comes in handy when it involves parting with information on the market or giving his partner access to his distribution network. That's all he can offer. The foreign partner brings in the technology, assures continuous funds and lends his brand name to the vehicle. After a point of time,he gets wise to the vagaries of the Indian car market and builds up his own information base on marketing and distribution. And that's when the role of the Indian automaker is as good as over in the project.

During this time, what would he have gained? Very little except for exposure to new working standards and using the knowledge for his own unit. Many of the joint ventures began optimistically but the harsh realities of the market soon caught up with them. Cars just did not sell and eventually the all-important agenda of giving Maruti a run for its money stays merely a pipedream.

M&M and Telco realised this early and decided to concentrate on their own pet projects. In the case of the former, it was "Project-Scorpio" that tilted the scales while Telco figured out that the Indica needed more attention than the slow-moving Merc W-124 class (now the W-210). The others did not stand a chance and were nudged out because they just could not cope financially.

PAL's relationship with Peugeot was marked bydeep distrust between the partners which led to a court-room battle and an eventual divorce. In the case of its other project with Fiat, PAL's only solution to keep the Kurla plant from going down under was to sell the assets to Fiat. In the bargain, a 50-year-old legacy came to and end but the choice was survival, not sentiment.

Interestingly, one could then ask if the foreign player is infallible? Not quite, say insiders who have seen them at work here. According to them, most international companies do not accept the basic concept that India is a highly price-sensitive market. It is all right for products like the Escort and Astra to be state-of-the art but a price tag of over Rs 8 lakh is an issue -- the critical one -- for the customer. Statistics don't lie and it is clear that over the last six months sales of these cars have been nothing to write home about. On the contrary, a price cut announced by Daewoo Motor set sales of the Cielo soaring in the last three months.

The other common complaint isthat foreign car companies have not really appreciated the importance of "Indianising" their management yet. An expatriate marketing genius whose skills have been proved in Europe or the US could draw a blank in India as consumer preferences here vary violently from state to state and even in neighbouring towns in the same state. To be able to predict a particular buying pattern for a product, especially a car, is practically impossible in a system where brand loyalty is very strong.