Durgapur Steel Plant Revamp Cost Zooms

Modernisation costs of the Durgapur Steel Plant (DSP) of SAIL have gone up to a staggering Rs 4,854 crore at present from the Rs 2,668 crore envisaged earlier, when the update programme was launched in 1989.

Sources said that the final cost of the update programme would have been Rs 3,993 crore, if there was no time over run and no variation in physical parameters. The plant management, however, assured that Rs 4,854 crore was the final cost, although minor variations might crop up during the closing of the various packages of the project.

Attributing the time over run to the break-up of the erstwhile Soviet Union, sources said this adversely affected the pace of modernisation as the Russian steel conglomerate, Tyazpromexort, was involved in the DSP update programme in a big way.

 

However, the completion of such a project in seven years was a major achievement for the DSP project management team. Projects of similar volume had taken much longer time elsewhere in the country, they claimed. Referring to the results of the modernisation, the plant has come up to a level of 1.6 million tonnes of hot metal and 1.5 million tonnes of crude steel which meant that DSP had attained around 80 per cent of the post modernisation rated capacity levels.