A DuPont spokesperson refused to confirm the deal with SRF but said talks were on with some Indian and foreign companies for a strategic alliance or a joint venture. He did not give further details.

The share price of SRF has been moving up on the stock markets in the past few weeks. It was quoted at Rs 34 on Monday on National Stock Exchange.

SRF chairman Arun Bharat Ram could not be contacted for his comments.

This would be the second major acquisition for SRF in its tyre related business. SRF had earlier taken over nylon tyre chord division of Ceat from the RPG group.

DuPont Fibres was promoted by Thapars way back in 1986 and was originally to be set up at Goa. The project was opposed by the environmental lobby and was subsequently shifted to TamilNadu. DuPont was brought in in as joint venture partner by the LM Thapar group. The Thapars had a 45 per cent stake in the Rs 600 crore project. DuPont had 50 per cent holding and Mitsui Corporation of Japan held 5 per cent.

The memorandum of understanding signed between the Thapar group's flagship Ballarpur Industries and DuPont stated that the project would be for manufacture of nylon 6,6 industrial yarn and fabrics and other nylon 6,6 products like carpet yarn, textile yarns and engineering plastics.

Bilt, however, decided to exit from the project about two years ago as part of its restructuring programme. The Thapars sold the stake to EI DuPont India. The company's name was changed to from Thapar DuPont Ltd to DuPont Fibres Ltd in July last year. Its nylon 6,6 yarn based industrial fabric unit is located at Gummidipoondi near Chennai in Tamil Nadu.

In phase one, the proposal was to implement a project to manufacture 18,500 tonne a year of nylon 6,6 industrial yarn and 13,000 tonnes of industrialfabrics. The total investment envisaged for a 10-year period was estimated at Rs 1,600 crore.

The company started with a 13,000-tonnes per annum (TPA) nylon yarn project. The project had faced initial hiccups as some non-government organisations raised a bogey that it was not environment friendly. DuPont, however, successfully managed to counter the criticism of the project from the environmentalists' lobby which it said had been misled. The company installed the latest state of the art equipment for pollution control and was cleared by the Tamil Nadu State Pollution Board.

Besides nylon tyre cord and fabric business, DuPont also has Tynex monofilament, Teflon coating and engineering polymers projects in the company.