Twenty-two years in one company, and a decarbonisation brief nobody wanted

There is a particular kind of authority that comes from having been in the same building for twenty-two years. Meera Deshpande started as a graduate engineer in the rolling mill at Angul in 2004 and has watched Kalinga Steelworks attempt, and abandon, most of the good ideas currently being proposed to it.

In June 2026 the company gave her the group decarbonisation portfolio on top of running long products, its six-million-tonne division serving construction and infrastructure. The logic was defensible and slightly cruel: put the transition with the person whose division pays for it.

Everyone in the industry already knows it and we have collectively agreed to phrase it as a challenge rather than an answer.

The arithmetic she will not soften

Deshpande’s public position is that Indian long-products producers cannot fund electric-arc conversion out of current margins. This is not a controversial claim technically. It is unusual only because executives in the sector generally phrase it as an opportunity requiring policy support, and she phrases it as a shortfall requiring a mechanism that does not currently exist.

The distinction matters for how the industry lobbies. A sector describing a challenge asks for encouragement. A sector describing a funding gap has to name a number, and naming a number invites scrutiny of whether the industry has been reinvesting its own cash flow appropriately in the meantime.

Institutional memory as a liability

She is clear-eyed about the risk of her own tenure. "A very long memory for which good ideas we have already tried," she says, "is more useful than it sounds and more dangerous than it sounds." The danger is that conditions change and the memory does not update — that a scheme which failed in 2013 for reasons specific to 2013 gets dismissed in 2026 on reputation.

Her practical guard against this is to require anyone proposing something the company has tried before to write down why it failed the first time. If they get the history wrong, the proposal is not rejected; it is returned. She has said the exercise usually improves the proposal and occasionally corrects her.