Tata Steel Ltd. will need to raise funds for its Odisha project, Tata Steel Managing Director H M Nerurkar has confirmed.

Nerurkar said the company hadn't scaled down its modernization plans and to carry on those plans the company would obviously require funds.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an award giving ceremony, Nerurkar said, "We will obviously need to raise money because of our ongoing expansions in Odisha, but we have not finalised our plans."

Reports also suggest that Tata Steel Ltd. could mandate a project financing loan of up to Rs. 22,000 crore to fund the expansion of its Odisha plant. The potential loan will likely be India's biggest loan for the fiscal year of 2012-13.

Tata Steel is installing up a six million tonnes per annum greenfield facility at Kalinganagar in Odisha, which will be completed in two equal phases, with nearly Rs 34,500 crore investment. The first phase of the Odisha plant expansion is expected to be finished by the year of 2014.

As of March this year, the company spent Rs 3,700 crore in the project, which was proposed to be funded via a 65:35 debt-equity ratio.

The steel producer operates a 6.8 million tonnes per annum steel plant at the domestic facility in Jamshedpur, where it is expanding capacity by three million tonnes per annum through brown-field expansion. In total, it has a around total 27 million tonnes per annum capacity, including facilities in the Netherlands and the U. K.