NEW DELHI: From an overall import country of urea, India is soon going to become urea surplus nation and will start exporting as it plans to produce additional 20 million tonnes of the fertiliser this year, said Fertiliser Minister Ananth Kumar here on Tuesday.
“We will soon become a urea surplus country from a urea deficit country as we are going to produce 20 lakh tonnes additional urea this year. We will start exporting urea soon,” Kumar said.
Kumar added that after steps to revive defunct fertilizer plants, there was no crisis of fertilizer anywhere in the country and all states and Union Territories were satisfied with its availability.
The country consumes 31 million tonnes of urea annually, out of which 23 mt is produced and rest is imported. To enhance the production of urea, the government has earlier approved the revival of Talcher (Odisha) & Ramagundam (Telangana) units of FCIL by PSUs through ‘nomination route’ and Barauni unit of Hindustan Fertilizer Corporation Limited (HFCL) & Gorakhpur unit of FCIL through ‘Bidding route’. Now Sindri unit is approved for revival through ‘Bidding route’. Earlier, its revival was to be done through PSUs (SAIL & NFL), the cabinet statement said.
The production of urea from the new unit will be more than double i.e. 3.6 to 8.64 lakh metric tonnes annually. With this, India is likely to start export of urea and it would translate into a saving of about `600 crore annually to the government due to reduction in cost of production and import substitution. Government subsidy for urea amounts to around 75 per cent of production cost.