'Steel industry must innovate to cut costs'

To avoid land acquisition problems for setting up industries, industrialists should think of innovative layout plans to reduce the land requirements," said Y Sivasagar Rao, joint managing director and chief executive officer, JSW Steel.

Delivering the keynote address at the Global Steel Conference - Vision 2020 recently, he pointed that while Visakhapatnam Steel Plant acquired over 20,000 acres of land to set up a 3 million-tonne steel mill, in China, a 10 million capacity mill is coming up on below 5,000 acres.

"If we can reduce land requirements, our investments and maintenance costs will come down drastically and farmers too would feel happy."

According to the National Steel Policy, the country's steel production will rise to 200 million tonnes by 2020 from the existing 62 million tones.

But if all the expansion plans, the new greenfield integrated steel plants and plans of foreign companies come true, steel production will reach 300 million tonnes by 2020, he stated.

In spite of huge iron ore reserves, Chain has been importing ore from other countries and conserving its ore reserves, whereas India is exporting 100 million tonnes of ore every year without meeting the domestic demand.