Vedanta plant resumes operations in Odisha

Bhubaneswar :  Vedanta Aluminium Limited (VAL) Monday resumed operations at its alumina refinery in Odisha’s Kalahandi district after remaining shut for 10 days due to raw material shortage, a top company official here said.

“The refinery has been re-started at a reduced capacity of 60 percent after we managed to arrange about 35,000 tonne of bauxite from Chhattisgarh and about 90,000 tonne from Gujarat,” VAL president Mukesh Kumar told IANS.

Last month, the company had informed the state government that the operations at the alumina refinery would be halted by Dec 5. However, due to non-availability of bauxite it had closed down the plant ahead of schedule Oct 12.

Mukesh Kumar said VAL might again shut down the refinery temporarily Dec 5 if it did not manage to get more raw material for the plant.

The one-million tonne per annum alumina capacity refinery at Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district has been operating at reduced capacity since its commissioning in Aug 2007.

Set up with an investment of $800 million, VAL requires 300,000 tonne of bauxite per month to run the refinery at full capacity.

Vedanta wanted to mine bauxite from Niyamgiri Hills near the refinery, but the approval was mired in litigations and protests by locals.

It has also applied for several other bauxite reserves in the state, but none of them have been materialised so far.

VAL, which is an associate company of the London-listed Vedanta Resources, has been running the plant by buying bauxite from different states.