Sohar(Oman)/New Delhi: India's only private manufacturer of rails, JSPL, is confident of making early deliveries to the Indian Railways if it succeeds in securing the Rs 3,500-crore rail tender, a top company official said.
Since the company has a capacity to produce 1 million tonne (mt) of rails, it is capable of fulfilling the Railways' demand of 7 lakh tone alone, the official reasoned. The Ministry of Railways has recently floated a global tender to procure 7 lakh tonnes of rails worth Rs 3,500 crore.
This is the first time that the railways has come up with such a tender. "It is a golden chance for JSPL (Jindal Steel and Power Limited) as the company has been looking to make inroads into the domestic rail segment for about a decade," Naushad Ansari, CEO Steel Business, JSPL, told PTI over phone.
State-owned Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) is the only company supplying rails to the Indian Railways. Ansari said: "We are fully prepared and well equipped. We can make early deliveries compared to any other player. If we bag the tender today, we can start making deliveries in just three weeks. It would take much longer for a foreign firm to start making deliveries. JSPL has a capacity to supply over 50,000 mt rail per month."
The company supplies rails to other countries like Iran, Bangladesh, Mozambique and Brazil. It has yet to enter the domestic rail space as the Indian Railways has been procuring rails from SAIL under an agreement it had signed with the PSU, Ansari said.