Indian Cement Industry

The manufacture of Portland cement was started in England around 1825. Belgium and Germany started the same in 1855. America started the same in 1872 and India started the same in 1904. The first cement factory was installed in Tamil Nadu in 1904 by south India Industry Limited and then onwards a number of factories manufacturing cement were started. Out country is fifth largest produce of cement in the world and is expected become the second largest, after china, by the turn of the century.

In our country, there are about 51 companies and 99 plants having installed capacity of manufacturing 770 million kN of cement and with this installed capacity, the Indian Cement Industry is the fifth largest in the world after China, former Russia, Japan and U.S.A. It accounts for about 4 percent of the world production. Some of the important highlights of the Indian Cement Industry can be

The Indian consumers have become very quality conscious and as the global high worth companies in the cement sector are planning to enter the Indian Cement Industry, the cement companies of our country have decided to update their cement manufacturing technologies by importing equipment from foreign countries mainly based in U.S.A., Germany and U.K.

The main machinery in a cement plant comprises limestone crusher and stacker reclaimer, roller mills for grinding, coal crushers, packers, pollution control equipment, belt conveyers, etc.

It is a fact that the cement industry is major consumer of the energy using 1.5 per cent of the world-fuel and abuts 2 percent of electricity produced globally. Hence the attention is paid to find out ways and means to optimize power consumption I raw materials, coal and clinker grinding. One of such development is the vertical roller mills (VRM) and it allows for higher drying capacity with less consumption of power. The coal is also increasingly replaced by the groundnut husk to fire the kiln.