CS Verma at the news meet in Ranchi on Thursday. Picture by Prashant Mitra

Ranchi, March 13: Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) is confident of achieving the target of steel production as envisaged in Vision-2025, given the pace of modernisation of its steel plants.

According to SAIL chairman C. S. Verma, “Vision-2025 has set the annual target of steel production at 300MT by that year with SAIL’s share at 50MT. Though a fortnight is still left for the current financial year, SAIL will comfortably achieve the year’s target of 15.3 MT of hot metal.”

Verma was speaking to the media this afternoon at SAIL’s management training institute in Ranchi after presiding over the PSU’s annual business plan meeting attended by senior company officials.

He said the steel company had placed orders worth Rs 72,000 crore for the current modernisation plan of which Rs 52,000 crore had already been spent. This, he added, would augment production to 24MT per year by 2015-16.

For reaching production levels of 26MT, required to achieve Vision-2025, SAIL would be spending $26 billion in the future.

“While the rest of the world is experiencing a recession in the steel market, India stands a better chance to market its products,” Verma said, adding that though the rest of the world had installed capacity of producing 1,800 MTPA, it was only producing around 1600MTPA.

“Saturation in the market has resulted in under utilisation of capacity,” he explained.

Verma said there was enough scope in the domestic steel market. At 59kg, per capita consumption of steel was far below global standards.