Vedanta Aluminium Limited (VAL) on Wednesday
temporarily shut down its alumina refinery in Odisha's Kalahandi district
due to shortage of bauxite.
Set up on an investment of $800 million, VAL requires three lakh tonnes of bauxite per month to run the refinery at full capacity.
The one-million-tonne per annum alumina refinery at Lanjigarh, about 500 km from Bhubaneswar, has been facing raw material shortage since it was
commissioned August 2007.
"The refinery would re-start only after sustainable supplies of the bauxite" VAL president and chief operating officer Mukesh Kumar told IANS.
The company was till now
running the plant by sourcing raw materials from different states as the earmarked mines located in a nearby Niyamgiri Hills could not be commissioned till date.
For the last few days, the refinery had cut down output by 80 per cent as its stock of bauxite exhausted. Bauxite is the key raw material used to produce alumina.
Vedanta had entered into a supply arrangement with Odisha government who was to
supply bauxite through a state agency from Niyamgiri Hills located near the refinery, but its clearance is mired in litigation.
The company has also applied for several other bauxite reserves in the state, but none of them have materialised so far.
VAL is an associate company of the
London-listed Vedanta Resources Plc .
With inputs from IANS 
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