Shimla, July 14 (IANS) Surya Roshni, the country’s largest manufacturer and exporter of GI (galvanised iron) pipes, Wednesday said its Karnataka facility will start production by the end of this fiscal, a top company official said here Wednesday.
“Our pipe manufacturing facility at Shimoga in Karnataka would be operational by end of this financial year. For this, the company is investing Rs.150 crore,” executive director Utkarsh Dwivedi told IANS.

He said the plant would annually produce one lakh tonnes of GI pipes.

“With the commissioning of this plant, the company would annually produce around seven to eight lakh tonnes of pipes,” he added.

The company has steel pipe facilities in Bhuj in Gujarat, at Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh and at Bahadurgarh in Haryana.

Dwivedi said Surya Vijayanagar Steels and Power Ltd, a subsidiary of Surya Roshni, has signed an memorandum of understanding with the Karnataka government in June this year at the Global Investors Meet to set up a steel plant with an outlay Rs.20,000 crore in Bagalkot district.

“The proposed steel plant would annually produce six million tonnes of steel,” he added.

Surya Roshni’s officials were in Shimla to launch the company’s programme to educate consumers on the hazards of using substandard pipes.