Enthused by the success of last year's voluntary retirement scheme, Steel Authority of India Ltd plans to further rationalise its workforce by another 5,000 this fiscal.
The reduction of workforce would be based on a mix of natural attrition and voluntary separation, bringing to around 126,000 the number of employees, company sources said.
Last year, SAIL brought down its employee strength by 5,500 through a host of measures, including voluntary retirement, SAIL Chairman V S Jain said.
The reduction of manpower would also help SAIL to bring down staff costs and retire unproductive workers.
Last year SAIL spent around Rs 500,000 per employee aggregating to Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) on the separation scheme.
The company's current employee strength stands at 131,190 as on March 31, 2004.
Since 1998, when the steel giant went into losses it has been able to bring down its staff strength by 45,000.
SAIL also registered an improvement in labour productivity by 137 tonnes of crude steel per man year, an improvement of 11.38 per cent over the previous year.
SAIL net at Rs 2,512 crore
Buoyed by huge profits of Rs 2,512 crore (Rs 25.12 billion), the first net profit in six years, steel giant SAIL on Friday announced a massive investment of at least Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 100 billion) to increase production capacity to 20 million tonnes.
"We will grow faster than any other steel producer in the country. We will take our production from 12.5 million tones to 20 million tonnes by 2011-12," V S Jain said while announcing the 'highly encouraging' performance which helped it wipe out its entire accumulated losses of Rs 2,765 crore (Rs 27.65 billion).
SAIL had last reported a net profit of Rs 133 crore (Rs 1.33 billion) in 1997-98.
© 2026