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Informist, Friday, Jul. 25, 2025

NEW DELHI – The Indian steel market is susceptible to being captured by steel makers from other countries, and the main challenge for the government to achieve its 2047 target of domestic steel capacity of more than 500 million tonnes is to ensure that the domestic demand for steel is not captured by overseas companies, said Ashwini Kumar, the economic adviser to the steel ministry.

Steel companies globally are looking at the Indian market and trying to sell their steek here, Kumar said at an event in New Delhi Friday.

Hinting at China, he said "the biggest steel producing country, a non-market economy, is using all kind of tricks." It was hard to know the level of subsidies that economy's government is giving its steel companies, Kumar said.

The steel ministry's economic adviser said Indian steel companies must up their game and not just catch the entire domestic demand but also expand to overseas markets. On the issue of the current provisional safeguard duty of 12% on steel imports, Kumar said the steel ministry is waiting for the final investigation report of the Directorate General of Trade Remedies on the industry's complaint of overseas companies dumping injurious steel at very low prices.

Kumar said "if you look at global trade map, steel is one of the most protected commodity" in cross-border trade. He said the US chooses to impose high levels of tariffs on its steel imports and the European Union also has safeguard duty-like protection for its steel industry.

Steel is a hard-to-upgrade sector and keeping that in mind, the low-cost pathway for the transition to low-carbon steel is recycling of scrap, Kumar said. But given the historically low domestic consumption of steel, there is not enough availability of steel scrap and the country depends on large imports of scrap, he added.

More than 20% of steel scrap imports come from the EU, but the bloc imposes restrictions on export of steel scraps to countries which are not members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, including India, Kumar said. This is a tricky situation to be in, he said, as on the one hand, the EU was pushing India to reduce its carbon emissions in the steel sector and on the other hand, it was constraining India's ability to take a low-carbon course of using steel scrap in production.  End

Reported by Rajesh Gajra

Edited by Tanima Banerjee

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