On Thursday, January 12, India unveiled a draft National Steel Policy which envisages to ramp up national steel production to 300 million mt per year and to reduce dependency on imported coking coal by 50 percent by 2031.
The draft National Steel Policy has been put out in the public domain seeking comments and feedback from various steel industry stakeholders who have been directed to submit their feedback to the Ministry of Steel by January 23.
“The Indian steel sector is disadvantaged due to limited availability of essential raw materials, and due to shortage of domestic coking coal, both in terms of quality and quantity, pig iron producers and blast furnace operations in India are significantly dependent on imported coking coal,” the draft policy said.
“The Indian steel industry still has significant potential for growth, underscored by the fact that the per capita steel consumption in the country at 61 kg is much lower than the global average of 208 kg. The proposed policy aims at achieving increased per capita steel consumption of 160 kg by 2030-31,” the draft policy noted.
Indian crude steel production in 2015-16 amounted to 89.77 million mt. It noted that in 2015 India was the only large economy in the world where steel demand continued to demonstrate positive growth at 5.3 percent, against the negative growth of 5.4 percent in China and seven percent in Japan.