Govt to invest Rs 45,000 crore on steel units expansion

New Delhi, July 18 (UNI) India is keen to have a tie-up with Japanese steel majors - Nissin Steel , Mitsui and JEE for acquiring technology for expansion of steel plants run by public sector companies SAIL and RINL.

On his return after visiting steel plants in Japan early this month, Steel Minister Ram Vilas Paswan told the mediapersons today that Japanese companies had expressed desire to participate in the expansion plan of SAIL and RINL. The government has already announced to invest Rs 45,000 crore on the technological upgradation and expansion of steel plants.

Japanese companies have been involved in setting up and modernisation of Indian steel plants like Salem Steel and Bhilai in the past. ''We want to continue this relationship whereby Japanese technology can be infused into our plants,'' said Paswan.

Mr Paswan admitted that the cost of production of steel by Japanese companies was lower than that of the Indian ones even though Japan imports iron ore from India and other countries. He, however, attributed it to technological upgradation and better material handling by the Japanese plants.

Energy consumption of Japanese plants is much lower than Indian counterparts, he said, ''we have told our project managers to go in for technological upgradation using one fitting in state-of-the art category.'' As much as Rs 25,000 crore would be invested in SAIL alone, Mr Paswan said that investment should be put to constant monitoring and time-to-time reviews besides making it time-bound for three years.

The Minister said a ban would be put up on export of some items of steel despite India suffering shortage in some others.

The export of scrap would also be discouraged instead it will be put to use in domestic plants. Rather, plants will be encouraged to use maximum scrap for which the import duty on steel has been reduced to 20 per cent now, the Minister said.

SAIL will be exanded to 23 million tonnes per annum (MTPA from present 14.6 MTPA and capacity of RINL be doubled to 6.3 MTPA by 2009 under the government plan to increase the domestic steel capacity to 110 million MTPA by 2020.

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