New Delhi, Dec 10: The next edition of India's flagship biennial automobile show, Auto Expo, will be held from February 6-12, 2014 at Greater Noida, moving away from the traditional venue of Pragati Maidan.
The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) on Monday said the change in timing and venue was mainly to avoid clash with the Detroit Auto Show and unavailability of Pragati Maidan.
Traditionally, the auto expo starts in the first week of January.
"In the next Auto Expo, which will be held from February 6-12, we will be showing only vehicles and accessories at the India Expo Centre and Mart at Greater Noida," SIAM Director General Vishnu Mathur said.
When asked what necessitated the change, he said: "Lot of global CEOs who wanted to be here have said to us that they could not because of their engagement with the Detroit Auto Show. So we decided to shift our Auto Expo to February".
For the components, the exhibition will be held in a separate venue and is being still worked out, he added.
On moving out from Pragati Maidan, Mathur said: "In February 2014, it is not available and hence we had to move to Greater Noida".
SIAM Deputy Director General Sugato Sen said the Auto Expo 2014 will be much bigger in terms of exhibition space. "We will have 50,000 square metres of occupied space by exhibitors as compared to less than 40,000 square metre that we had this year's Auto Expo," Sen said.
In order to have a trial run ahead of the 2014 expo, SIAM will be organising a bus and utility vehicles show from February 15-18, 2013 he added.
Mathur said moving the Auto Expo to a farther place from the main city will not be an issue as "we are hoping that only the serious visitors will now come".
At the end of Auto Expo 2012, the organisers -- SIAM, Automotive Component Manufacturers Association (ACMA) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) -- had said they were mulling to move the next edition of the biennial trade show out of Pragati Maidan to a more spacious 'world-class' location so that it can become the largest in the world.
Amid criticism over mismanagement and crowd control in this year's edition, entry of visitors was restricted due to security and infrastructure issues and a total of 7,00,000 people had visited the expo during the week-long trade show.
