A fortnight after closure of its 1 million tonne alumina refinery at Lanjigarh on December 5, Vedanta Aluminium (VAL) said it will inform the Odisha labour department in two days on its plan to lay off employees.
"We have been forced to take a decision on laying off employees from our Lanjigarh plant. But the details on how many employees are to be retrenched and the people who are to be redeployed are yet to be crystallized. We will also inform the state labour department in two days regarding our lay-off plan as per Industrial Disputes Act,” said Mukesh Kumar, chief executive officer, VAL (Lanjigarh).
Already 2,000-2,500 contractual employees engaged in bauxite loading and unloading and transportation have lost their jobs as a fall-out of the refinery closure, Kumar said.
VAL had 620 executives on its rolls of which 75 have already quit two months back on uncertainty surrounding the future of the refinery complex.
"There are 550 executives left now with VAL and they are being paid salaries on time,” said Kumar.
Around 6,500 people, including 550 employed directly, 5,000 engaged indirectly and 1,000 self-employed, in and around the plant depended on the VAL refinery for their livelihood. The company claimed to have spent Rs 150 crore on the development of the local area and community.
VAL's announcement on lay-off contradicts a recently submitted report of the district labour office (DLO)-Kalahandi stating that there was no retrenchment at the company's refinery.
VAL had closed its plant from December 5 basing on a three-month advance notice to the state government and had attributed the cause of closure of refinery to economic unviability of the plant in the absence of assured supply of bauxite.
"The management of VAL-Lanjigarh has stopped production of alumina from December 5 as per the notice to the government but it has not closed the main gate of the establishment and retrenched any workmen or employee,” the DLO said in his report to the State Labour Commissioner.
VAL had gone for temporary shutdown of the refinery and intended to resume operations only after having five to six months of assured supply of bauxite. To run the 1 million tonne per annum refinery plant at full steam, VAL needs 300,000 tonnes of bauxite every month.
VAL had designed its refinery in Odisha keeping in mind the locally available bauxite. The aluminium major had entered into an agreement with state controlled miner Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC) for supply of bauxite. But attempts to mine bauxite at the ecologically sensitive Niyamgiri hills under OMC’s leasehold were red flagged by the environment ministry that had scrapped the Stage-II forest clearance on August 24, 2010.
The company’s bid to continue the refinery operation by sourcing bauxite from other states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Chhatishgarh, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh was also thwarted by various logistic, regulatory and procedural issues.
