Laxmi Mittal pulling out his 12 million tonne steel plant from Orissa will be a big blow to the state. Ditto, if it happens, for the 12 million tonne plant from Posco that was to costs Rs 54,000 crore. But it would be foolhardy to write off investment in Orissa. In the last 5-6 years, the state has got around Rs 80,000 crore of investment – on the ground, not counting the MoUs and the plans, like Mittal’s, that are yet to take off. “What are the big investments we’ve had in the last 55 years? Rourkela, Paradip and Nalco. After adjusting for inflation, this is several times that”, says BJ Panda, BJD MP from Kendrapara.
And, if things go according to plan, even the 6 million tonne Tata Steel plant at Kalinganar may finally get to see the light of day. Around 800 of the 1,150 families likely to be affected by the Rs 21,000 crore plant have been relocated and around two thirds of the area has already been cleared. The company has brought in some equipment and is pre-fabricating structures in a different location – given the company’s ability to move out of Singur, however, everyone’s keeping their fingers crossed.
But, even without Mittal, Posco or the Tatas, Rs 57,000 crore has been invested in the steel sector. Bhushan Steel, for instance, has already commissioned 1.5 million tonnes of its 3 million tonne plant; Essar Steel is in the process of getting the land for its 6 million tonne plant.
Equally important, 29 of the 49 MoUs signed by the state for small and medium-sized steel units have taken off and these 29 units, between them, have a capacity of 6.2 million tonnes – by way of comparison, Tata Steel’s current capacity is 6.8 million and Jindal Steel’s is 8 million tonnes. The small mills include names like Adhunik Metaliks, Action Ispat, Sree Metaliks, SMC Power Generation and SPS Steel Ltd. The 29 units, according to a recent review by the state’s steel and mines secretary have invested Rs 30,370 crore, and created 56,720 jobs – 17,432 of them are direct jobs. The total tax paid to the centre, till December last year, was around Rs 1,626 crore; another Rs 580 crore was paid to the state. The units also generated 1,034 MW of power from captive plants.
On the aluminium front, Rs 9,652 crore has been invested in three projects and of this, the major share of Rs 8,530 crore was spent by Vedanta Aluminium on its twin projects – a 1 million tonne alumina refinery at Lanjigarh and 0.5 million tonne aluminium smelter at Jharsuguda. Similarly, Aditya Aluminium, which is setting up a 1.5 million tonne refinery and 0.36 million tonne smelter, has already put in Rs 1056 crore.
None of the 21 independent power producers with whom MoUs were signed have made significant progress and have invested Rs 6,144 crore so are – two of the power plants, Sterlite Energy and Bhusan Energy, are close to commissioning their first phase work and they have incurred expenditures of Rs 3280 crore and Rs 900 crore respectively. All told, the 21 companies have plans for investing Rs 108,000 crore to create 26,000 Mw of power.
Of the four PPP port projects, the Dhamra port, developed jointly by Tata Steel and L&T, is on schedule to commission two berths this year and Rs 2,000 crore has already been spent on the project.
The IOC Paradip refinery is another big-ticket project, on which Rs 2,400 crore has already been invested, but the Rs 29,777 crore refinery is already behind schedule by five years.
Among other projects, three cement plants (with a combined expenditure of Rs 850 crore till date), an auto parts plant (Rs 30 crore) and a titanium dioxide plant (Rs 65 crore) have seen actual investments happening on the ground though the state is still to go a long way in converting some of the big investment proposals into reality.
