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Tata Steel would incur an additional investment of Rs 20 crore towards construction of its proposed ferrochrome plant near Gopalpur to enable the unit to withstand wind speed of 250-300 km per hour.
“We have decided to invest Rs 20 crore more to make the ferrochrome plant's construction stronger so that it can endure wind speed of up to 300 km per hour”, said Arun Misra, vice president of Tata Steel's Gopalpur project.
The Gopalpur area, off Ganajm coast in southern Odisha, is identified as a cyclone prone zone.
Phailin, the very severe cyclonic storm made landfall near Gopalpur on October 12, 2013. Exactly a year later, another severe cyclonic storm, Hudhud struck the coast of Andhra Pradesh near Visakhapatnam and also affected Gopalpur. Phailin, whose wind speed was in the range of 200-220 km at the time of landfall, caused large scale damage to infrastructure in Ganjam district.
The Gopalpur port, Odisha Sands Complex (OSCOM), a unit of the central sector, Indian Rare Earths (IRE) Ltd and caustic soda producing unit, Jayashree Chemicals, located near the sea-shore town had suffered huge damages due to Phailin.
“Keeping in view the successive cyclones that have hit the area, we have designed the plant to withstand high wind-speed”, Misra said. The steel major planned to develop the multi-product special economic zone (SEZ) along with an industrial park on around 2970 acres of land near Gopalpur, which was originally acquired in 1996 to build a steel plant.
Singapore-based Jurong Consultants, a consultancy firm, is preparing the master plan for the SEZ project.
As an anchor investor, Tata Steel has decided to set up two ferrochrome plants within the proposed industrial park. Construction work on the 55,000 tonne per annum ferrochrome unit is going on, and it is expected to start operation in March 2015.
The other plant with 240,000 tonne per annum capacity would be taken up after getting the environment clearance from the central government, Misra said. The company would invest around Rs 1200 crore on both the plants.
