The third blast furnace of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd (RINL - Visakhapatnam Steel plant) was commissioned on Tuesday.

It was built as a part of the expansion project to take the capacity of the plant from the present 3 million tonnes to 6.3 mt. The cost of the blast furnace along with the turbo blower, water system and auxiliary systems is estimated at Rs 3,800 crore.

Mr A. Eswara Rao, the senior-most employee, and Mr Md. Khalil, the junior-most employee, did the honours on the occasion of blowing-in of the newly-constructed blast furnace No. 3 in the presence of the Chairman and Managing Director, Mr A.P. Chowdhary.

With the blowing-in, hot metal production would begin from the new blast furnace within 72 hours. The blast furnace will on the aggregate produce 7,150 tonnes of hot metal per day.

Mr Chowdhary said that it was a great milestone in the expansion project, as the blast furnace started hot metal production. Currently, he said the two existing blast furnaces were producing 3.9 mt of hot metal and by the end of the current financial year, the hot metal production would go up to 4.5 mt. By 2014-15, he said, hot metal production would go up to 7.5 mt. He said that in the next phase of expansion, 5 mt more would be added to the capacity of RINL and the estimated expenditure for the next phase is Rs 22,000 crore.

In response to a question on how RINL would meet the cost for the next phase of expansion, Mr Chowdhary said that for the present phase of expansion the company had met the expenditure (Rs 12,500 crore) out of its internal accruals. But for the next phase it may go in for loans and the debt-equity ratio may be 1:1.

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