SAIL, RINL line up Rs50,000 crore investment to double production
23 Apr 2007
Mumbai:
The Steel Authority of India (SAIL) and Rashtriya Ispat Nigam (RINL), will pump
in Rs50,000 crore to expand operations and cater to domestic demand, reports quoting
steel secretary R S Pandey said.
By 2010 these two companies will invest
Rs50,000 crore, Pandey said. The two PSUs will focus on growing within the country
to meet the demand here, he added.
SAIL, has a production capacity of
about 13-million tonnes and by 2010 it plans to produce 23-million tonnes. RINL
will double its capacity from 4-million tonnes currently during the same period,
he said.
At a time when private steel producers are acquiring companies
overseas, two government-owned units, SAIL and RINL, have lined up whopping investments
of over Rs50,000 crore to expand within the country to cater domestic demand.
Essar Global last week announced it would buy two companies abroad for
more than Rs7,300 crore.
Tatas recently acquired Anglo-Dutch steel company
Corus for over $12 billion and added new acquisitions since then.
Pandey
had earlier said India would emerge as the second largest steel producer in the
world by 2015-16 with an estimated production capacity of 120 million tonnes by
then and 180 million tonnes by 2019-20.
Pandey said the consumption level
in India is still very low at about
38 kg and there is lot of scope for further increase in the demand. He said the
government had made an assessment of the demand-supply scenario to avoid a glut
situation in the medium to long term.
