Operation and maintenance portals helping KIOCL stay afloat: CMD

KIOCL Ltd (formerly Kudremukh Iron Ore Company Ltd) hopes that the operation and maintenance portals will help in rejuvenating the company in the absence of captive mines.

In an informal chat with presspersons on the sidelines of a conference on ‘Global challenges, policy framework and sustainable development for mining of mineral and fossil energy sources’ organised by the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) at Surathkal in Mangaluru on Friday, Malay Chatterjee, Chairman and Managing Director of KIOCL Ltd, said that the company has taken up three projects in the absence of a captive mine to gainfully use its manpower.

KIOCL had to close its captive mine at Kudremukh in Karnataka on January 1, 2006 following a Supreme Court order.

Stating that the company has more than 300 expert engineers, he said: “To gainfully use the people in the absence of active mine, we have taken up three projects.”

One of them is helping Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd to run its coke plant and another one is to operate and maintain beneficiation and pelletisation plant of NMDC at Donimalai. Around 60 engineers will be working at Donimalai. The agreement and all those process have been completed, he said.

It has also taken up, on a tender route, the running of beneficiation plant of Orissa Mining Corporation. The plant has been taken over on April 1, and 29 engineers and staff are in Orissa to run this plant, he said.

“These are the developments where we are seeing that the company rejuvenates through the portal,” he said.

Chatterjee said that the company is also pitching aggressively with the Karnataka Chief Minister for the allotment of mines to KIOCL.

Recently, the Union Minister of Steel and Mines, who reviewed the status of KIOCL in the present context after the closure of Kudremukh mines, had said that he would take up an exclusive meeting with CM to allot a mine to KIOCL, he said.

On the mine closure procedure in Kudremukh, he said the company had planted eight lakh saplings eight years ago, and seven more lakh saplings were added subsequently.

This initiative has already taken shape, and helped stabilise the mining slope. These initiatives have been done with inputs from the Karnataka Forest Department and the University of Agriculture from time to time, he said.