Udayapur Cement seeks Rs 200m to buy raw materials, generator

Udayapur Cement Factory has asked the government to provide it a fund of Rs 200 million to buy raw materials and generators, and to upgrade obsolete machineries.
The state-owned cement manufacturer, which had been seeking financial assistance from the government since last year, submitted a proposal to this effect to the Ministry of Industry (MoI) last week.
"We need funds to procure raw materials and buy a generator,” Surendra Chaurasiya, general manager of Udayapur Cement Factory, told Republica over phone.
The government had not released any amount of money to the factory last year due to its failure to release full-fledged budget on time.
“I am hopeful that the government will arrange funds this time,” said Chaurasiya.
The factory with installed capacity of 500 tons is also suffering from overstaffing and obsolete machineries. The factory has 525 staff on its payroll.
“We need to upgrade the machines if we are to ensure smooth supplies in the market,” he added.
The MoI, which looks after state-owned enterprises, has decided to forward the factory´s proposal to the Ministry of Finance (MoF).
“At the moment, we are studying the proposal submitted by the cement factory,” an official at MoI said.
Earlier, officials of MoI had said that they were working on to address problems faced by the cement manufacturer.
Lack of raw materials is the biggest problems faced by the factory. As the factory sources key materials, including coal, from India, the government´s procurement policy creates hassles to it time and again. “Because of the policy we cannot take prompt decision as per the market mechanism to procure required amount of raw materials," he added.
The factory, which was established around 18 years ago with Japanese assistance, is also losing its production capacity due to obsolete machineries. "Some of our machineries are 18 years old. We need to replace them as soon as possible,” Chaurasiya said, adding, “But we need a huge amount of money for that.”
The factory has cumulative loss of Rs 17.73 billion. The MoI had even requested MoF to arrange Rs 1 billion last year from the Russian government. However, the MoF didn´t forward the request to the Russian government.
The study of public enterprises conducted by the government in fiscal year 2011/12 had suggested upgrading machineries of the state-owned cement manufacturer.