The Hindu Business Line : Increase production capacity of steel: PM

Bokaro, April 22 The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, today focused on the need to increase the production capacity of steel in the country to meet rising consumption demand. He was here on Tuesday on the occasion of flagging off the expansion and modernisation project of SAIL’s Bokaro Steel Plant.

“Though the steel industry has made rapid progress in India, it still needs to do much more in order to meet rising consumption demands,” Dr Singh said. India’s share was much lower than many other countries in terms of steel production, he said. Projects such as the expansion and modernisation of Bokaro Steel Plant would help meet demand, he added.

Need to scale up

Mr Ram Vilas Paswan, Union Minister for Steel, also pointed to the need to augment production saying, “Steel production in India is growing at 10 per cent today, while the growth in domestic consumption is around 13 per cent. This calls for huge scale up in production.” In this regard, Mr Paswan hailed the expansion projects of SAIL at an investment of Rs 54,000 crore across the country in five integrated steel plants and two specialised plants across the country to increase production from 14 million tonnes (mt) to 26 mt.

The Bokaro expansion project by SAIL entails an investment of Rs 11,000 crore to ramp up production of steel from 4.36 mt to 7 mt by 2010.

“India needs to graduate from the 5th position in global steel production to the 2nd position by 2015,” Mr Paswan said. “Initially, we had a target of raising production to 110 mt by 2020. I am happy to announce that we can easily reach a production of 124 mt by 2011-12 and have also set a new target of 300 mt by 2020.”

Jharkhand plant

Mr Paswan also announced plans to set up a 12 mt steel plant in Jharkhand. However, the minister said that the future of the project was subject to availability of iron ore from the Chiria iron ore mines. “The issue of sharing of the 2 billion tonne reserves of Chiria between SAIL and private producers is now before the court. We need an early resolution of the issue to give a concrete shape to this proposed greenfield project,” he added.

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