Tata’s Nano, billed as the world’s cheapest car, will finally go on sale in India in April, seven months late.

The Indian conglomerate announced that the tiny vehicle, which it said last year would be sold for a starting price of 100,000 rupees (£1,400), will be on display at Tata Motors dealerships from the first week of April, with bookings starting a week later. The final price of the car will be confirmed on March 23.

The launch of the Nano, which will probably cost about as much as a CD player in a Lexus and was hailed as a marvel of ultra-cheap manufacturing when it was first unveiled in January 2008, stalled when farmers claimed that the land on which the main factory being built to produce it had been taken illegally.

After violent protests, Tata was forced to abandon the site in West Bengal, writing off up to $350 million dollars in investment and scrapping the original launch date of October. The Nano, a key symbol of India’s ambition to rival China as a manufacturing superpower, was designed to draw middle class Indians away from their motorcycles. However, analysts suggest that Tata will only be able to produce about 3,000 a month until the end of the year, just a fraction of the 250,000 a year the West Bengal plant was due to make.

The main factory that will produce the 33bhp two-cylinder runabout has been transferred to the state of Gujarat in western India but will not be completed for several months. The first Nano will instead be produced in small numbers in Pune, about 170km north of Mumbai, and at Pantnagar in northern India.

The project has been beset with hurdles. From the outset it drew criticism from environmentalists who said the last thing India’s gridlocked cities needed was more traffic.

Last summer, it was feared that the surging price of raw materials had scrambled the low-cost business model Tata had formulated. Since then, commodity prices may have collapsed but so have car sales in India.

Tata owns Jaguar and Land Rover in the UK.

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