BHUBANESWAR: The Posco authorities on Friday ruled out the possibility of the company withdrawing from its proposed steel plant project near Paradip in Jagatsinghpur district.
“We will not quit,” said Gee Woong Sung, Posco-India’s chairman-cum-managing director, after meeting Odisha Chief Secretary G C Pati at the state secretariat here. “We have been waiting for the last several years,” he said. The Posco-India CMD, however, refused to divulge details of his hour-long meeting and maintained that the “meeting was positive”.
This was the first meeting of Sung with the Chief Secretary, after taking over as the CMD of Posco-India.
However, there are several hurdles before the Posco project gets going. The Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation has acquired 2,700 acres of land for the first phase of the proposed project and has already handed over 1,700 acres land to the company.
Besides, the issue of mining linkage is yet to be resolved. Sung also discussed the issue of mineral linkage for the project with the Chief Secretary.
The Centre had recently sought clarifications from the state government on its recommendation to grant prospecting licence to Posco-India to mine iron ore from the Khandadhar mines in Sundargarh district.
Posco had signed a memorandum of understanding with the state government on June 22, 2005, to set up Rs 52,000-crore steel plant project. The MoU, which lapsed in 2010, is yet to be renewed.
Originally, the project capacity was 12 million tonne per annum. It was subsequently scaled down to 8 MTPA.