- Current role
- President, Long Products
- Company
- Kalinga Steelworks
- Experience
- 26 years
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Based
- Bhubaneswar
About
Meera Deshpande runs the long products division at Kalinga Steelworks, a business of roughly six million tonnes of annual capacity serving construction and infrastructure customers. She has been with the company for twenty-two years and moved into the president role in 2024.
Her division is the part of the company most exposed to the cost of decarbonisation, and Deshpande has been notably unromantic about it in public — arguing that Indian long-products producers cannot fund electric-arc conversion out of current margins and that the sector should stop pretending otherwise while lobbying for a transition mechanism it does not have.
She began as a graduate engineer in the rolling mill at Angul and has held commercial rather than technical roles since 2011.
Leadership perspective
- Can Indian long-products steel decarbonise on current margins?
- No. I can say that plainly because everyone in the industry already knows it and we have collectively agreed to phrase it as a challenge rather than an answer.
- What does twenty-two years at one company give you?
- A very long memory for which good ideas we have already tried. That is more useful than it sounds and more dangerous than it sounds.