Pilot facility for specialised steel likely in 2 years: Tata Steel executive.

A pilot facility that is being planned to produce a specialised grade of steel used in transformers and generators may take about two years to come up, said a senior executive at Tata Steel, which is part of the Rs. 500 crore public-private project.

Only a handful of companies globally manufacture the material - cold-rolled grain-oriented steel, or CRGO steel. According to industry executives, India spends about Rs. 4,000 crore a year to import CRGO steel and its local production will help save foreign exchange and reduce the cost for Indian manufactures of transformers and generators.

'The time to set up the entire pilot facility is expected to be around two years. The development of CRGO will be completed within six months of completion of the pilot plant,' said T Venugopalan, technical adviser to managing director at Tata Steel.

The plant will be housed in the Jamshedpur campus of the National Metallurgical Laboratory (NML), which comes under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Tata Steel and Rashtriya Ispat may invest about Rs. 125 crore each in the project, while the remaining funds would come from the steel ministry and NML, officials said.

A budget of Rs. 150 crore has already been approved for the pilot project, a senior official at the steel ministry told ET. 'The objective is to initiate research and development in the direction of indigenous production of CRGO steel ... We might also ask some foreign company to do some hand-holding.'


ET