Tata Steel to start work at Orissa plant in Dec

KOLKATA, Nov 14 (Reuters) - India's Tata Steel (TISC.BO) will start constructing a 6-million-tonne steel plant in the eastern state of Orissa from next month, its Managing Director H.M. Nerurkar said on Saturday.

"Eighty percent of the people have already been evacuated from the site and we hope to start the construction by December 2009," he told reporters on the sidelines of a seminar.

He also said the firm, the world's sixth-biggest steelmaker, will conclude expansion of its Jamshedpur plant by June-August 2011.

Tata Steel, which operates a quarter of its 30 million tonnes annual capacity in India, is already working on raising domestic capacity to 10 million tonnes from 6.8 million. (Reporting by Niladri Bhattacharya; Writing by Nishant Kumar; editing by Keiron Henderson)