Company assistant general manager (personnel) Dilip Sengupta told The Financial Express on Wednesday that after October and November, when the management was worried over rising stocks, things turned brighter and it would stay that way till at least January next year.

In India, the HCV market gets better from Diwali and improves till the onset of the next monsoon. "Though we have more orders today, we would finally end up making around 2,595 vehicles during December. We are also quite definite about rolling out around 4,000 vehicles in January next year," Mr Sengupta said.

"Telco [the company is still known better by this name] would turn out to be a dark horse," he added. Mr Sengupta dismissed the allegation of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and a section of Telco's 300 ancillary units around Aditypur here that the automaker was placing orders elsewhere ignoring the local ancillaries. He said, "it was absurd to say this as Telco was also interested in using quality components and in bringing down the cost of its own inventory, both of which were most possible only by placing orders locally."

Mr Sengupta said the six-day `block closure' between November 27 and December 3 for maintenance, relocation etc, was a `corrective step' and allegations that the company had not given prior information to the ancillaries were unfounded. "We had given three weeks' prior notice about it to all concerned," he said categorically.

On the ticklish issue of the around 3,000 temporaries demanding permanent jobs in the company, Mr Sengupta said: "The company has already absorbed the 192 workers of the 1991 batch this year. No company can give permanent employment at one go to 3,000 workers. We are trying to give them employment by rotation. We have raised the strength of the temporaries' workforce in December to 600, which we expect would go up by another 200 in January." The temporaries are currently being hired from the 3,000-odd pool on a monthly basis.

The company did not recruit any temporary hand in 1992 and 1993. The majority of the 3,000-odd temporary workers who are now with Tata Engineering belong to the 1994 and 1996 batches, with a few belonging to the 1995 batch also.

Tata Engineering is striving to maintain the quality of its vehicles at all its works by stringently following tools like the `six-sigma' and `balance score card' so that it can release zero-defect products in the market. "We are continuously striving to bring improvements in our vehicles," Mr Sengupta added. Two of its wholly-owned subsidiaries, HV Axle Ltd and HV Transmission Ltd, have almost finalised tie ups with multinational auto giants for manufacture of axles and transmission systems, respectively, to be used in Tata Engineering's vehicles. All this is likely to give Volvo a good fight. The market rumour is that apart from utility vehicles, the Swedish manufacturer is planning to make HCVs from its newly set up assembly line in India.

Tata Engineering is also expecting positive news from Pretoria in South Africa where it has bid, with DaimlerChrysler, for supply of a large number of HCVs to their government.