Steel supply to rise massively to 12 lakh tonnes for Indian Railways track in 2018-19.
Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) confident to supply 10 lakh tonnes of steel in 2018-19 and 12 lakh in 2019-20 to the Indian Railways for doubling of railway lines, gauge conversion, new lines and track renewal and repair works.
Indian Railways recently have indicated and informed the lower house for its demand of approximately 14 lakh tonne during 2018-19 and 17 lakh tonne in 2019-20. SAIL has established Universal Rail Mill (URM) in its Bhilai Steel Plant to upgrade the manufacturing capacities of Rails to cope up with increasing demand of Indian railway requirements. The production from the 1.2 MTPA capacity URM has commenced from November, 2016.
Bhilai Steel Plant undertook modernization and expansion plan along with other integrated steel plants under SAIL with capacity enhancement of crude steel from 3.93 MTPA to 7.0 MTPA. This included the installation of URM.
Currently there are only two steel companies who manufactures rails in India which are SAIL and JSPL.
SAIL manufactures 260-metre long rails at Bhilai Steel Plant and Naveen Jindal-led JSPL (Jindal Steel and Power Limited) makes 121-metre long rail track at Raigarh unit and can weld these rails up to 480 metre.
SAIL was the only supplier of rails to the Indian Railways until JSPL bagged an order in July last year to supply one lakh tonne rails.
Railways is looking at 4,000 kilometer of track renewal in each financial years 2018-19 and 2019-20.
The national transporter had invited the global tender for procuring about 4.87 lakh tonne of rails after anticipating that SAIL would not be able to supply the required amount of rails.