JSW Steel asks 11,000 employees to work from home

JSW Steel, one of the country's largest private steel players, has asked 11,000 employees out of a 20,000-strong workforce at its main steel plant in Bellary, Karnataka to work from home after 106 employees tested positive for Covid recently. However, the plant is "operating at full capacity and there has been no impact of the developments on production at the shopfloor," Vinod Nowal, deputy MD JSW Steel told ET on Saturday.

A total of about 400 employees have been kept in quarantine while their family members and neighbors are in containment after it was found that a Covid positive employee had come in primary and secondary contact with 500 of his fellow employees.

Following this, JSW Steel mobilised the administration and got all the 500 employees tested within a day. Out of them, 106 employees tested positive. "While all of them are in hospital, barring five, the rest of the employees have shown no sign of the infection," Nowal said.


"We wanted to break the chain of transmission. Hence, we took all precautionary measures to contain the spread," he added.
Hence, only those employees whose presence at the plant is necessary have been asked to report for duty. The remaining employees, including non essentially staff, have all been asked to work from home for the next five days, the JSW official said.

Output at JSW Steel, India’s leading maker of steel, climbed to a touching distance of the pre-Covid levels in May, although exports underpinned a significant proportion of the production and helped offset domestic demand at its earliest stage of revival.

At 12.48 lakh tonnes, capacity utilisation climbed to 83% in May, from the low of 38% in April. JSW's output in May more than doubled from 5.63 lakh tonne it had produced in April, and not far from 14 lakh tonnes in May 2019. Domestic steel demand revived to only about a third of normal levels during the month due to weak automotive sales, but rising exports continued to help prevent inventory stockpiles.