Vedanta Announces Plan For a New Steel Plant In Jharkhand

Kolkata: Vedanta Ltd has announced plans to set up a new steel plant in Jharkhand at an investment of $3-4 billion over the next few years. The plant will have a capacity of 4.5 million tonne per annum.

The new plant, primarily part of its second phase of capacity expansion, will be set up adjacent to its newly acquired Electrosteels unit in Bokaro, media reports quoting Vedanta Resources chairman Anil Agarwal as saying.

“This would be a new steel plant under ESL and in the same location at Bokaro… so it’s a brownfield investment per se. The amount is likely to be to the tune of $3-4 billion for a capacity of 4.5 million tonnes (MT),” he said here.

Vedanta would initially invest around $300 million to augment Electrosteel Steels’s capacity to 2.5 MT from the existing 1.5 MT. Once the new facility is commissioned, the total capacity of Electrosteel Steels would be around 7 MT, Agarwal said.

The company is in talks with Korean, Japanese and Chinese firms for technology and machinery for its proposed expansion, Agarwal said.

Expressing his intent to create a “second Bokaro”, Agarwal hoped that requisite clearances for the project would be in place in the next six to eight months. “Currently, Bokaro produces about 7-8 MT and we are working towards creating another Bokaro in Jharkhand,” he said.

The plant would create 1,20,000 jobs in the form of direct and indirect employment, he added. “We have about 2,200 acres at ESL and are scouting for a little more… The Jharkhand government has been very cooperative in this regard.”

In March, Vedanta was declared as the successful resolution applicant for ESL under the corporate insolvency resolution process. The company acquired control of Electrosteel Steels and a new board of directors was put in place.