At least in one case, West Bengal found God to be stubbornly anti-industry. Other-wise, why should IISCO, a unit of Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL), be kept in an agonising wait from commissioning a coke oven battery, a sinter plant and a wire rod mill built as units of an integrated 2.5-million-tonne (mt) capacity steel plant at Burnpur? The commissioning of the three units was postponed as some villagers doggedly refused to the shifting of a deity in the form of two intertwined trees from the plant site area at SAIL’s cost to a suitable alternative site. The deity’s command area may be small, but it stands in the way of ingress of raw materials and egress of coke, sinter and wire rod.
Fortunately for SAIL, worshipping of the deity named Jhorabudi at Burnpur, unlike the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha where Vedanta’s attempts to open bauxite mines have so far come a cropper because of global protests against displacement of Dongria Kondh tribesmen, remained a local issue calling for settlement at local political and administrative levels. The impasse is now hopefully ending with the villagers finally agreeing to shifting the deity to a convenient plot. As soon as this happens, IISCO could start the process of switching on the coke oven battery and sinter machine. Coke oven heating up will take three months. Moving the deity to a new abode and also creation of compensatory water bodies for the filled ones in the project area will create condition for rapidly laying the railway track for moving coke, sinter and slag.
In a smart move, IISCO wanted to commission the coke oven and sinter plants well ahead of the blast furnace (BF) and basic oxygen furnace (BOF)-steel melting shop (SMS) and send coke and sinter for use by other SAIL units. As the wire rod mill lying ready, the interim plan is to feed the mill with billets brought from the Durgapur Steel Plant (DSP). All this is because IISCO’s own new BF and BOF-SMS will be ready for commissioning in the final quarter of 2012-13. But what IISCO did not bargain for was a group of locals making a mountain out of some trivial issues. IISCO chief executive officer N K Jha says, “delays in commissioning the coke oven and sinter plants are hurtful for us. What is not good for West Bengal is the message that may go out to potential investors for the impasse. Fortunately, a solution has now been found”.
Tata Steel’s success in packing an extra three mt capacity at Jamshedpur to make it a 10-mt mill and the SAIL move to build a 2.5-mt new plant at Burnpur, both by way of installing very large BFs, are seen as the industry’s attempt at negotiating land shortage problem. “We have 953 acres, including 600 acres available in the existing IISCO area and the balance acquired to build a 2.5-mt mill. Our land use at Burnpur for the greenfield plant works out to 381 acres per mt. This sets a new benchmark for land use efficiency for the Indian steel industry,” says SAIL chairman C S Verma. The challenge is to make the best of breakthroughs in technology allowing installation of a single big machine instead of multiple units.
There could have been much saving of time in building the Burnpur plant had it not been for removal of 2.5 mt of slag boulders, including 150,000 tonnes of slag mixed with iron and steel and the difficulty in driving piles in the 600-acre plot. This is because the operating IISCO mill stuck with obsolete twin hearth steel making and dumped slag here for years without giving a thought to recycling of waste materials. A sad legacy of the past. Jha says, “We earned about Rs 200 crore by selling iron and steel recovered from slag and granulated BF slag. This goes to show the value embedded in steel mill waste.” Once the new plant becomes operational, the old mill, which long ago outlived its useful life, will be dismantled releasing 575 acres for productive use.
It is largely because of SAIL that West Bengal is seeing an end to its investment drought. The new IISCO mill is claiming to bring an investment of Rs 16,000 crore. SAIL is also investing Rs 4,000 crore in modernisation of DSP and in the next door Alloy Steels Plant (ASP). An investment of Rs 1,500 crore has been earmarked to build a 500,000-tonne plant to produce premium grade iron in the form of nuggets in ASP’s spare land. The plant will see the use of Kobe Steel’s path-breaking ITmK3 technology, allowing manufacture of nuggets from ore fines and non-coking coal.
“It is incumbent upon us to create conditions for use of ore fines, of which we have mountains rising at mine sites and non-coking coal of which unlike coking coal India has huge reserves.”
A new SAIL investment possibility of up to Rs 7,000 crore in a 1.2-mt speciality steel plant at Kulti, where following closure of a pipe unit some 850 acres are available. For this to happen, SAIL will need state government help in finding solution to some long-standing issues. SAIL investing close to Rs 30,000 crore will be an image makeover for West Bengal.