Adilabad CCI: revive or scrap? Pick one
Twenty-eight years shut. The BJP-led Centre’s own company moved to value and tender the unit’s assets. Telangana asks for revival; Delhi sharpens the scrap knives.
Adilabad CCI has been non-operating since November 1998.
A Hyderabad round-table on August 21 pushed, again, for the revival of Cement Corporation of India’s Adilabad unit. BRS leaders joined academics and activists to say what Adilabad has known for decades: jobs left with the clinker dust, and Delhi never came back with the brooms. According to CCI’s own 2022–23 annual report, production at Adilabad stopped on November 5, 1998 and the unit is classified as “Non-operating”. The same report says idle assets at such units are being disposed of “as is where is”, and for Nayagaon/Adilabad the “asset valuation [is] completed” with “tender under preparation.”
So while Telangana argues for revival, the BJP-led Centre’s playbook has been valuation and tender prep for disposal. A report in April said machinery was being dismantled for scrap under a Union tender, and noted earlier CCI talks about a modernisation budget near ₹2,000 crore. If Delhi is serious about revival, it has a strange way of showing it: start with the scrap dealers.
On record, the Union line hasn’t promised a restart. Back in 2017 the Ministry of Heavy Industries told Parliament it had received Telangana’s revival proposal — and pointed instead to a strategic sale of CCI units, inviting the state to bid when the sale began. That’s not a commitment to Adilabad; that’s “join the auction”.
At Friday’s meet, BRS leaders alleged the BJP had failed Telangana and warned against any quiet handover to private interests. Those are political charges; the documentary record we do have is simpler and worse: the Centre’s company moved the unit into the asset-disposal lane years ago. The Congress and the BJP take turns in Delhi; Adilabad stays 1998.
The Ministry of Heavy Industries, CCI and Telangana’s Industries Department have not bothered to explain how “revival” squares with asset valuation and scrap removal. Until they do, the BJP-led Centre looks less like a partner and more like the auctioneer.