Abid Khazandar Al-Riyadh India's largest automobile company, Tata Motors, has decided to establish its third largest automobile manufacturing plant in the Eastern Province. The proposed plant is expected to manufacture 100,000 Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles a year and create 4,000 to 5,000 job opportunities for Saudis. The Indian company unveiled plans to make investments worth 100 million pounds to build the plant to meet the growing demand for its cars in the Middle East and North Africa region. The reports showed that the Tata facility will be an assembly plant. This means that the plant needs only a small number of workers. Apart from this, there is no need for high expertise to run the facility. Hence, it makes no difference if the plant is located in India or Saudi Arabia. In both cases, it would neither solve the rising unemployment problem among Saudis nor add anything to the Saudi economy. By establishing such assembling plants, we are emulating countries that made such experiments more than 50 years ago. Moreover, we are not adding anything new to the world of technology. What we need in the Kingdom are high-tech industries where semi-skilled foreigners will not be in a position to compete with highly-skilled Saudis. We can point out dozens of such projects, especially those that make use of raw materials produced by the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC).
