IISCO’s Burnpur plant

New Delhi, March 7: The Steel Authority of India Ltd today cleared an investment of Rs 319 crore in a coke oven battery at IISCO’s Burnpur plant.

This is SAIL’s first investment in IISCO since it took over the plant last month. A SAIL official said the board has agreed to the rebuilding of coke oven battery No. 10. The battery was built in the early 1980s and had been closed down in 1997.

IISCO needs to run two batteries at a time to produce 0.75 million tonnes of coke per annum, which will ensure 1 million tonnes of hot metal production.

“Hence, rebuilding of battery No.10 was crucial and should be completed by 2008-09 so as to ensure continuous supply of coke for 1 million tonne of hot metal production,” officials said.

SAIL and IISCO have drawn up an upgradation plan for the latter, which would require an investment of around Rs 8,017 crore. Following this, IISCO’s annual hot metal production capacity will go up to 2.5 million tonnes by 2011-12 from the present 0.85 million tonnes.

SAIL took over IISCO to leverage its iron ore mines at Chiria in Jharkhand, which have an estimated reserve of 2 billion tonnes of high-grade iron ore.

Almost all steel-makers, including the Mittals, Jindals and Tatas, have been eyeing the Chiria mines. All of them are still lobbying so that the Jharkhand government can take back part of the giant iron ore lease and parcel it out to them.

In the first phase, IISCO, the oldest iron and steel company in the country, will invest in a 2,000-cubic-metre blast furnace, apart from renovating two blast furnaces, each of 1,170 cubic metres. It will also set up a new coke-oven battery, besides the two existing coke-oven batteries. A new sinter plant and a continuous casting plant are also in the pipeline.

The 125-year-old company was taken over by the government in 1972 and attached to SAIL as its subsidiary six years later.

The government has planned some 11 proposals to modernise IISCO’s more than 75-year-old Burnpur steel plant. But those could not be undertaken due to political and bureaucratic indifferences.

This will be the first time money will be spent to modernise IISCO and add capacity since 1958, when Sir Biren Mukherjee’s Martin & Burn management agency took an IMF loan to modernise the steel-maker.