Vedanta Aluminium, which runs a one million tonne alumina refinery in Lanjigarh block of Orissa’s Kalahandi district, will shut its unit from Saturday. This comes least two months before it had served notice for closure due to acute shortage of bauxite.
A senior official of Vedanta Aluminium said, “Though we had served the mandatory three-month notice on state labour department under the Industrial Disputes Act last month for closing down the unit on December 5, we have to shut down early. We were hoping to get some bauxite from Gujarat through tender but that would not be possible before October 23. We have given notice to Grid Corporation of Orissa over shutting down of our 75 megawatt captive power plant at Lanjigarh.”
Vedanta needs 10,000 tonnes of bauxite every day, but till last month it was getting anything between 4,000-7,000 tonnes a day.
The refinery has been facing a crisis of bauxite ore supply after the environment ministry in August 2010 withdrew the stage II forest clearance for the diversion of 660.749 hectares of forest land for mining bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills.
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