Completion of industrial and infrastructure projects is expected to proceed at a brisk pace in the second half of 2012-13.
According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, projects worth Rs 3.7 lakh crore are likely to go on-stream in this period that is 32 per cent higher than the value of projects completed in the same period a year ago.
CMIE arrived at these estimates after interviewing promoters of projects worth Rs 4.5 lakh crore that were scheduled for completion in the second half and its own assessment.
Projects worth Rs 1.3 lakh crore were completed in the first half of the fiscal and if CMIE’s projections for second half commissioning are realised, this will take the total value of projects going on stream in 2012-13 to Rs 5 lakh crore. This would be a sizeable improvement compared with completion of projects worth Rs 4.3 lakh crore in 2011-12.
The bulk of the projects that are expected to go online in the second half fall in the electricity, steel, petroleum products, LNG storage and distribution and cement sectors.
Power generation
16,592 MW of power generation capacity is slated to start operations in the last six months of this fiscal year with commissioning of about 1,570 MW in October alone.
The largest project slated for completion is the first 1,000 MW unit of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant. Besides this, Talwandi Sabo Power and Emco Energy are expected to commission power generation units of 1,320 MW and 90 MW capacity, respectively.
The power sector has already seen 8,532 MW of capacity addition in the first half and total addition in 2012-13 is pegged at 25,484 MW. This is higher than the achievement of 16,336 MW of power generation capacity addition in 2010-11 and 23,170 MW in 2011-12.
Petro capacity
Around 5.6 million tonnes of petroleum products capacity is also slated to come on stream in 2012-13. This includes 2 million tonnes added in the first half. The key to this projection being realised will be completion of the 3 million tonnes per annum expansion of Indian Oil’s Mathura Refinery, besides de-bottlenecking of Chennai Petroleum’s Manali Refinery in March 2013.
This is however far lower than the 25.7 million tonnes of petroleum production capacity added last year.
In the LNG storage and distribution sector, successful completion of Gujarat State Petronet’s 1,750-km pipeline addition plan will take total capacity addition during 2012-13 to 4,050 km.
The steel industry is forecast to add 12.8 million tonnes of capacity in the second half of 2012-13, with the major contributors identified as SAIL (3.4 million tonnes), RINL (2.3 million tonnes), Bhushan Steel (2.1 million tonnes) and Jindal Steel (2 million tonnes).
This will take the total steel capacity addition during the year to 14.4 million tonnes, down from 16.8 million tonnes in the previous year.
In the cement sector, 21.2 million tonnes of additional production capacity has been lined up for completion in 2012-13, of which 5.7 million tonnes was established in the first half.
The major projects targeted for completion belong to ABG Cement (3.3 million tonnes), Vicat Sagar Cement (2.8 million tonnes), Heidelberg Cement India (1.9 million tonnes), Cement Manufacturing Company (1.6 million tonnes) and Century Textiles & Industry (1.5 million tonnes).