Who will be the next SAIL chairman? 15 in race; interview to take place Monday

COME August 31 (Monday) and it will be known who is the most suitable candidate to head Maharatna PSU steel maker SAIL.
Government head-hunter Public Enterprises Selection Board (PESB) will interview as many as 15 top officials for recommending the most suitable candidate.
The state-run steel maker reported a net loss of R321 crore in the first quarter of the current fiscal—its first quarterly loss in over a decade.
The aspirants include four CMDs and a woman officer from the Indian Railway Accounts Service (IRAS).
A total of five or one-third of the aspirants...
are internal candidates. This includes the PSU steel maker’s two directors on the board, finance director Anil Kumar Choudhary, and Kalyan Maity, director-raw material and logistics. Choudhary is the senior most director of the PSU. Chief executive officer of SAIL Durgapur Steel Plant (DSP) P K Singh is also in the fray as well Sail’s two executive directors—Umesh Kumar and S K Saha.
The four chairman-cum-managing directors in the race are Malay Chatterjee, CMD, KIOCL; MS Rana, CMD, Security Printing and Minting Corporation of India Limited (SPMCIL), Jaiveer Srivastava, CMD, The Fertilisers and Chemicals Travancore Ltd (FACT) and Rajiv Sharma, CMD, Rural Electrification Corporation Ltd (REC). The only woman in the list of aspirants is Rashmi Goel, an IRAS official.
Anupam Anand, director (personnel), Hindustan Copper Ltd; Vijay Nanda, director (projects), Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL); RP Singh, director (personnel), Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd (PGCIL) and NK Nanda, director (technical), NMDC, are also in the race. P K Mukherjee, member secretary, Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), is also vying.
SAIL has been without a permanent chairman since incumbent CS Verma was refused an extension by the government in June. Steel secretary Rakesh Singh has been given the additional charge of Sail chairman for three months.
NDA government had earlier refused to extend the tenure of SAIL chairman C S Verma till his superannuation. Thus he has become the first 'Maharatna' PSU head to be denied extension during the current NDA regime.
Verma was appointed SAIL chairman and managing director (CMD) for a 5-year term in June 2010 by the previous UPA government.
He was eligible for an extension till he attained the superannuation age of 60 years in September 2019.
Following the recommendation of the PESB for a new chairman, it would need the nod of the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) for the person to take over. It would certainly be a tough job for the new chairman to steer SAIL out of the current bad phase.
The steel industry has been passing through a difficult time with the burgeoning imports from China, Japan, Korea and Russia. Though the government has raised import duty on the alloy for a couple of times, each time by 2.5%, it didn’t benefit the industry much. The industry has been urging the government to impose safeguard and anti-dumping duties.
SAIL is in the final stages of completion of its Rs 72,000-crore modernisation and expansion programme that would enhance its hot metal capacity to 23.5 mtpa. The company has also readied a blueprint to take its capacity to 50 mtpa by 2025 with an investment of Rs 1.5 lakh crore.