By IANS,
Kolkata : The West Bengal government is committed to and will cooperate with JSW Steel Ltd, India’s third largest steel maker, in sorting out problems for establishing a 10 million tonne-capacity steel plant at West Midnapore’s Salboni, a minister said Saturday.
“Due to lack of important documents, the government officials found it difficult to address the issue earlier. Now that the company has given detailed documents and discussed with us their problems, the government will endeavour to redress them and work towards solving the impasse,” Industry Minister Partha Chatterjee said.
Company officials met Chatterjee to discuss land related problems the company was facing in establishing the Rs.350 billion unit. Representatives of West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC) were also present.
Chatterjee said whatever commitments and promises the company has made should be included in a single agreement.
“Whatever promises and commitments the group has made will be a part of one agreement. There is no need for creating different agreement for different commitments. The group has agreed to this suggestion,” he said.
“We have made separate paperwork for the different projects that will and have come up at the site. So, he had asked us to include all the different project works in one single agreement. We have done work on roads and water. We have promised jobs to the land losers. All this would now be included in one agreement,” Biswadip Gupta, joint managing director and chief executive officer, JSW Bengal Steel, said.
Earlier, the company’s vice chairman and managing director Sajjan Jindal had said the construction work of the plant will begin after the festive season in October this year.
Stating that land ceiling rules allow a single holder to keep up to 24 acres of land, the state government in its bid to regularise the land bought by JSW Bengal had earlier said it would keep title to 270 acres of the 290 acres of land bought directly by the company from land owners at Salboni.