STEEL: Kaiser v. Khrushchev

As Bulganin and Khrushchev tooled through India selling Communism last week (see FOREIGN NEWS), Henry Kaiser made a deal in India that would help strengthen capitalism. In Jamshedpur, 150 miles west of Calcutta, Tata Iron & Steel Co., largest steelworks in India, announced that it had picked Kaiser Engineers of Oakland, Calif, to build a $130 million addition to the plant, thus increase India’s capacity some 45%, and raise Tata’s production from 1,300,000 to 2,000,000 long tons of ingots annually.

The job, scheduled to take 30 months, will virtually give Tata a new integrated plant, including a new 26-oven battery of coke ovens, a 28-ft.-diameter blast furnace, a 46-in. blooming (rolling) mill, plus other mills for light structural steels and continuous sheet bars. Tata, however, needs $60 million of outside capital, mainly to buy $50 million worth of foreign equipment. This week the steel firm, part of a huge $286 million Tata empire (insurance, textiles, cement, etc.), wais negotiating for loans with the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the World Bank, and reports from Washington were encouraging.