Bokaro, June 1: A global team of technocrats from ArcelorMittal reached Bokaro to assess land and infrastructure conditions today in the wake of its recent MoU with SAIL in London for an automotive steel plant in India.
The seven-member team, three Frenchmen among them, made a detailed survey of Bokaro Steel Plant (BSP) today, including cold rolling mill and flat steel production unit. It also studied the available land inside the 37,000-acre premises of BSP that is well connected with road and rail.
The team, which reached Bokaro yesterday, will finish its survey tomorrow.
Among SAIL plants, only Bokaro and Rourkela units are equipped to produce flat steel. So, it is possible that the ArcelorMittal-SAIL joint venture plant, with a proposed capacity of 1.5MTPA, will involve either or both of these units.
Signed on May 22 by ArcelorMittal chairman and CEO Lakshmi Mittal, SAIL chairman C.S. Verma and Union ministry of steel secretary Rakesh Singh, the MoU promises a cold rolling mill and other downstream finishing facilities to offer technologically advanced steel products to India's rapidly growing automotive sector.
India is poised to become the world's fourth-largest automobile manufacturing nation by 2020, growing from approximately 3.5 million units today to over 7 million units.
In 2010, ArcelorMittal had shown keen interest in setting up a 12 tonne per annum steel plant at Petarwar, around 35km from Bokaro, for which it needed 2,500 acres but hardly got 10 acres.
But, experts say a plant for automotive steel would neither require large tracts of land nor iron ore or coal as it would use hot-rolled coil as the raw material.
Also, should it choose Bokaro over Rourkela for the automotive steel plant, ArcelorMittal will have access to BSL land. BSL senior officials and chief of communications Sanjay Tewary refused to comment on the developments, citing a "non-disclosure agreement between ArcelorMittal and SAIL".
A New Delhi-based SAIL corporate office senior official, who did not want to be identified, said the ArcelorMittal team would also visit Rourkela. So, whether Jharkhand or Odisha gets lucky is open to question for now.
