Vedanta chairman Anil Agarwal and (right) Tata Steel managing director TV Narendran at secretariat in Bhubaneswar on Tuesday. Pictures by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, Sept. 9: Tata Steel will hold road shows in South East Asian countries to attract investors for its proposed industrial park at the Gopalpur port. The steel maker is the anchor tenant, (the main tenant) for the industrial park being developed on 3,500 acres of land at Gopalpur,

“We have already organised road shows in Singapore and Thailand,” said Tata Steel’s managing director T.V. Narendran after meeting chief minister Naveen Patnaik here this evening.

Though Tata Steel had acquired the land in the mid-1990s for setting up of a port-based mega steel plant at Gopalpur, the company later shelved the project and decided to set up an industrial park there.

The steel-maker has lined up two projects at the Gopalpur industrial park — a 50,000 tonne per annum ferroalloys plant and 4,00,000 tonne per annum bar mill.

“The first phase project is likely to be operational by March, 2015,” said an official of the Tata Steel official.

Narendran today said that the three-million tonne steel plant being set up at Kalinga Nagar in Jajpur district was expected to be commissioned by March.

Kalinganagar project is the company's first integrated steel plant outside Jamshedpur. Though the company had signed an MoU with the state government in 2004 to set up a six-million tonne steel plant, the project could not take off after a police firing at the plant site in 2006, which killed 13 tribals protesting against land acquisition.

In a related development, Vedanta Group chairman Anil Agrawal today met the chief minister and apprised him of the raw material requirements for its alumina and aluminium projects set up at Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district and Jharsuguda.

“We are importing bauxite from Guinea and other countries to feed our plants. It’s most unfortunate that India happens to have largest bauxite deposit in the world,” said Agrawal adding that he was optimistic about getting bauxite from Odisha to run its Lanjigarh and Jharsuguda plants.

Vedanta Group has set up a one-million tonne alumina refinery at Lanjigarh and has plans to expand its capacity to two-million tonne in the next phase and ultimately up to six-million tonnes. The group had applied for sourcing mineral from the Niyamgiri bauxite mines. However, it has not got permission to access the bauxite mines. So it is procuring bauxite from elsewhere to run the refinery.

The group has set its eyes on two bauxite mines in Koraput for which prospective licence has been given to Larsen and Toubro (L&T). But mining lease was not granted to the company since it has no alumina/aluminium plant in Odisha. Thereafter, Vedanta and L&T floated a joint venture but even then it failed to get lease of the two bauxite mines.

Similarly, an aluminum smelter plant has been set up by the group at Jharsuguda.

“Only 25 per cent of its capacity has been utilised and we want to increase its capacity. But we are handicapped by the dearth of raw materials,” said Agarwal. However, laterite mines in Koraput has been given to the Vedanta Group.

“We will explore whether there is bauxite deposit in these mines and whether the available bauxite is fit for use in our plant,” said Agrawal.

Today, an MoU was signed between state micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) department and Ahmedabad-based G and GVFL Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd for launching a venture capital fund styled as “Odisha MSME Fund” in the state with a corpus of Rs 100 crores.

The fund will provide marketing and infrastructure developmental support to MSME units in Odisha. Registration work will complete within the stipulated six-month.

While the state government will invest around Rs 50 crore in the fund, the balance Rs 50 crore will be raised from banks, insurance companies, financial institutions and the Centre.