At a time when private steel producers are acquiring companies overseas, two government owned public sector units Steel Authority of India (Sail) and Rashtriya Ispat Nigam (RINL) have lined up whopping investments of over Rs 50,000 crore to expand within the country to cater domestic demand."By 2010 these two companies will be investing over Rs 50,000 crore. The focus of the PSUs is to grow within the country to meet the demand here," Steel Secretary R S Pandey told PTI in an interview.Sail is producing about 13 million tonne today and by 2010 it should be producing 23 million tonne for which the process has already begun, Pandey said adding RINL would almost double its capacity from four million tones currently in the same period."Others are going abroad to expand while Sail and RINL will take care of the domestic market."Last week Essar Global announced it would buy two companies abroad for more than Rs 7,300 crore.Tatas recently acquired Anglo-Dutch steel company Corus for over $12 billion.Pandey had earlier said that India would emerge as second largest steel producer in the world by 2015-16 estimating the production capacity of 120 million tonne by then and 180 million tonne by 2019-20.Asked whether government had done a study on the demand-supply scenario to avoid a glut situation in the medium to long term, Pandey said " In India the consumption level is still very low. There is lot of scope for further increase in the demand."
