Steel Minister asks SAIL to speed up Burnpur project

The 3 million tonne plant will be operational by December, says SAIL Chairman

Union Steel Minister Beni Prasad Verma on Wednesday asked the Steel Authority of India Ltd. (SAIL) to speed up work on the delayed Rs.14,000-crore Burnpur steel plant in West Bengal and expressed concern over the Rs.2,000-crore cost overrun.

Addressing his first press conference here after being elevated to the Cabinet rank in the same Ministry, Mr. Verma said continued cost overrun was not a good thing and asked SAIL to work towards making the three million tonne capacity steel plant operational soon. Initially planned to commission the facility by June, it got delayed due to a prolonged digging work at the plant site due to ‘difficult' and ‘unforeseen' soil conditions.

SAIL Chairman C. S. Verma, who was present at the conference, said the plant would be made operational by December and attributed presence of molten material for the delay in completing the digging work. “We had to dig out the molten material, which was a time consuming process. In fact, we have got Rs.100 crore by selling it,'' he remarked.

The Chairman said SAIL had embarked on a Rs.70,000-crore capacity expansion plan, including Rs.10,000 crore for the development of mines, to increase its capacity to over 24 million tonnes annually by 2012-13 from 14.6 million tonnes now.

The Chairman said that apart from the Burnpur plant, no other plant had been facing cost or time overrun and the hot metal capacity of the company would reach the targeted level by the end of 2012-13. Two blast furnaces would start in the current fiscal, taking the capacity to 20 million tonnes annually.

Steel Secretary P. K. Mishra said the market even today was not positive due to issues in Europe, but assured the company that the share sale programme would be launched within the current fiscal depending on the market condition. “It will happen in the current fiscal. It may happen in the next two-three months. However, that would depend on the market condition,'' he added.

It is also more than a year since the state-run firm signed an initial pact with South Korean Steel major POSCO for setting up a high-value auto-grade steel plant at Bokaro in Jharkhand. The plant was to use POSCO's Finex technology and produce 2.5-3 million tonnes of steel in a year with an estimated investment of Rs.15,000 crore.