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Supply crunch
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Bhubaneswar, Oct. 13: Vedanta Aluminium Limited today closed its refinery plant at Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district for an indefinite period because of the shortage of the raw material bauxite.
“We tried our best to procure raw material from different parts of the country but failed. Along with the refinery, power production from the 75MW captive power plant has also been shut down,” Mukesh Kumar, chief operating officer of Vedanta, said.
In 2010, the ministry of environment and forest had rejected Vedanta’s proposal to mine bauxite from the Niyamgiri hills. The company has been procuring bauxite from Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Gujarat.
“Mines in Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh are lying closed. It is not possible to get bauxite from Chhattisgarh and Gujarat because of legal problems. The ministry of environment and forest has not come to our rescue,” said Kumar.
He said Vedanta would resume production as soon as it got bauxite. The company requires 10,000 million tonnes of bauxite every day to operate its 1 mtpa capacity.
The company has invested around Rs 45,000 crore in the state. Its plant has an installed capacity to produce one million tonnes of aluminium and was in the process of expanding to six million tonnes when the environment ministry withdrew the clearances.
The Odisha government, which in its MoU with the aluminium major had committed to supply bauxite, has expressed its inability to come to the rescue of the company immediately.
Local people and employees of the company had met chief minister Naveen Patnaik last month to discuss the situation.
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