By A Newsman

Kolkata, 24 September: JSW Steel will set up a cement plant at Salboni in West Midnapore on a portion of the land that it had bought in 2007 for a steel plant.

The cement plant to be set up at an invest Rs 700 crore will have a production capacity of 2.4 million ton per annum, JSW Steel chairman Sajjan Jindal said in Kolkata on Thursday. Jindal was in the city to take part in a business session.

Later, Jindal called on Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at the state secretariat Nabanna in Howrah and invited her to lay the foundation stone for the cement plant in January next year.

Speaking to reporters, Jindal said that the plant would come up on 134 acres of land out of the near 4,000 acres that was originally earmarked for a steel plant. “A captive power plant of 300 MW capacity will also come up at the site. The total investment will be around Rs 2,000 crore”, he said.

JSW had signed an agreement with the previous Left government in 2007 to set up a 10 million ton annual capacity steel plant and a 1,600 MW of power plant at Salboni. The total investment, back then, was pegged to be around Rs 35,000 crore.

But later differences cropped between JSW and Mamata Banerjee led Trinamool Congress government over the land lease, delaying the project. The coal mine scam and the subsequent de-allocation of the mines by the Supreme Court came as the final jolt.

In December 2014, JSW announced that it has put on hold the steel plant project and later returned 294 acres of from the total land to their original owners.