KHARAGPUR: Chief minister Mamata Banerjee is scheduled to inaugurate a Rs 600-crore expansion plant of Tata Metaliks here on Thursday, in what would be a major fillip to industrialisation in Bengal.
A subsidiary of Tata Steel, Tata Metaliks - a more than Rs 2,700-crore company - already has a manufacturing plant at Kharagpur, which produces pig iron and ductile iron pipes. The plant's annual hot-metal production capacity, according to its website, is 5,00,000 tonnes. The expansion plant would function out of the existing facilities.
This would mark the first time Banerjee would inaugurate a Tata plant. One of the main issues that propelled her to government was a sustained agitation against forcible land acquisition by the Left Front government in favour of a Tata Motors plant in Singur, forcing the group to move out.
Banerjee will inaugurate the Tata Metaliks project virtually from the nearby Vidyasagar Industrial Park.
The Tata Metaliks plant in Kharagpur is more than two decades old. Kharagpur also has a Tata Hitachi plant, after the joint venture relocated its facility from Jamshedpur in 2019. The latter is its largest in the country. Now, the Tata Metaliks expansion project is set to make Kharagpur one of the major production hubs of Tata.
The brownfield expansion at Kharagpur was started in 2019.