Rs.143-crore plant to function from KMML complex at Chavara HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY: Industries Minister Elamaram Karim and Water Resources Minister N.K. Premachandran visit the Titanium Sponge Plant at Chavara, near Kollam, on Wednesday. KOLLAM: The country's first Titanium Sponge Plant (TSP) will be inaugurated at Chavara near here by February 15. Industries Minister Elamaram Karim and Water Resources Minister N.K. Premachandran told presspersons at the TSP complex on Wednesday that all efforts were being made to get Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to inaugurate the plant. The TSP is coming up within the complex of the public sector Kerala Minerals and Metals Limited. The civil work of the Rs.143-crore plant has been completed and machinery erection is under way. Mr. Karim said the trial run of the plant would take place during the first week of February. After addressing the media, Mr. Karim inaugurated the Tickle Purification Plant (TPP) of the plant. The TPP is the unit where the purification of titanium tetrachloride takes place. Titanium tetrachloride is the critical raw material for titanium sponge. KMML is the only producer of titanium tetrachloride in the country. The commissioning of the TSP will put India into a prestigious global position by becoming the seventh country in the world having the technology to produce titanium sponge. As of now, only six countries have the technology to produce titanium sponge, which is the raw material for the strategic metal titanium which was described by the former President of India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, as the metal of the 21st century. Countries having the technology are the United State of America, Russia, China, Japan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. The technology for India to produce titanium sponge was developed by the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL), a unit of the Defence Research and Development Organisation. The fund for erecting the TSP has been provided by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the entire production will be purchased by ISRO on a mutually decided cost-plus basis. The current price of titanium sponge is Rs.7 lakh a tonne. The TSP will initially have the capacity to produce 500 tonnes annually and this will be steadily increased to 1,000 tonnes. For space and aircraft applications, India at present required 350 tonnes of titanium sponge. Nearly 30 per cent of components of any Boeing or Airbus aircraft is titanium metal. In spacecraft, it is even more. Other industries, including bio-medical and ship building, require another 400 tonnes of titanium sponge. The entire requirement is being imported. But concerns over the quality and availability of the imported product compelled the ISRO to think in terms of developing the country's own technology for the production of titanium sponge.