Steel MoU with Luxembourg soon

NEW DELHI: India has sought cooperation from Luxembourg to modernise its growing steel sector. Consultancy major Paulwurth along with Netherland-based steel company Corus would be roped in for the exercise. Consultants would advise Indian firms in reducing cost of production and also help them in deploying the right technology.

According to sources in the steel ministry, the two sides would ink an MoU by the end of October. Accordingly, Luxembourg would provide technical assistance and facilitate transfer of technology to Indian steel companies from established players in the European market.

Europeans are also expected to teach Indian companies the art of producing a whole lot of value added products whose requirements would increase in coming years. The move towards MoU follows the visit of high level delegation of Indian steel industry led by minister Ram Vilas Paswan to Luxembourg, recently.

Despite high growth expected in the domestic steel industry, on various productive parameters the industry lags behind other global competitors. While the blast furnace productivity of plants of Steel Authority of India (SAIL) varies between 1.6 to 1.8 tonne per cubic metre per day, the same in some European countries vary between 2.8-3.2 tonne per metre cube per day.

While the performance of several other private sector steel companies is better, the government feels that they also need to use best available global technology to keep up with anticipated competition from international steel companies like Posco and Mittal.

Mr Paswan’s delegation included all the major players of the Indian steel industry. The delegation included SAIL chairman SK Roongta, Rashtriya Ispat Nigam (RINL) chief Siva Sagar Rao, Mecon CMD Dronadeb Rath and Tata Steel‘s T Mukherjee.