Tata Motors, India's third-biggest carmaker, has bagged an order from Britain's MG Rover to export 100,000 units of the hatchback car City Rover over four years, with the first consignment slated to reach Birmingham any day, the Sunday Times reported.

"One in six cars rolling off the Tata manufacturing line in Pune is destined for Britain, with 100,000 scheduled to arrive over the next four years," the newspaper said.

The City Rover, a modified version of the existing Tata Indica car, is produced in both 1400 cc petrol and diesel engines.

Indica is the sub-continent's first genuine indigenous car, designed and built by Indian engineers and workers with minimal foreign help, the report said.

Indica and its mid-size model Indigo has enabled Tata Motors to emerge as the third-biggest passenger carmaker in India, Asia's fourth-biggest automobile market estimated at about 600,000 units annually.

The City Rover/Indica will help plug a market gap for Rover, which has no small car of its own to sell. But for Tata and for Indian manufacturing, it is a giant leap forward.

A car industry that was once the butt of jokes for still assembling the Ambassador, a copy of a 50-year-old Austin, is now making modern cars without outside aid and - delicious irony - exporting them to Britain, the report said.

Tata's achievement should have western manufacturers shaking in their boots. It is one of many indications that Indian engineering groups may be about to do what Indian IT and business-outsourcing companies have done to their rivals for the past decade: thrashed them out of the market, the report said.

As with IT, cost is India's unbeatable weapon. Production-line workers at Tata's Pune plant earn Rs 12,000 a month (155 pounds), a pittance by western standards, but salaries at other factories in the city run at about Rs 2,000, it stated.

The decision to start the Indica project demonstrates a new-found confidence and aggression on the part of Indian industrialists. Since the country became independent in 1947, car companies have relied on foreign partners and simply churned out copies of the car giants' global designs, the report added.