KOLKATA - POLICE on Sunday surrounded the Indian plant slated to produce the world's cheapest car as activists prepared for a siege protest aimed at forcing Tata Motors to return the site to local farmers.

At least 200,000 people were expected to join the protest in Singur, 35 kilometres (22 miles) northwest of the state capital Kolkata, activists said.

'Security has been tightened in and around Tata's???small car project. More than 4,000 policemen have been deployed,' Raj Kanojia, police chief of West Bengal state, where Singur is located, told AFP.

The gates of factory, which is still under construction, have been fenced off, Mr Kanojia said, as concern mounted over an October deadline for the first of the US$2,500 (S$3,532) Nano cars to be produced.

Activists at Singur say they will only call off protests if the government hands back 400 acres forcibly taken from farmers, who have not accepted any compensation.

But West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, whose communist-controlled government wooed the project, insisted that the row would be settled.

'I'd like to assert the project will be a reality,' said Mr Bhattacharjee late on Saturday. 'Nobody can obstruct it.'

Tensions were high on Sunday across West Bengal, which has often been at the forefront of recent battles over land rights in India.

The struggles have pitted the interests of poor farmers who say they will starve without their land against those of business and India's government, which say the country needs to industrialise rapidly.

For more than two years the Tata factory site has seen protests by activists and villagers who say many farmers were forced to part with their land.

Elsewhere in the state, at Nandigram village, where the state government acquired land for a petrochemical hub, police in March 2007 shot dead 14 farmers opposing the move. -- AFP