India’s Ministry of Steel has recommended a slew of measures to be effected through the country's forthcoming national budget 2018-19, “to ensure growth and a level playing field” in the domestic steel industry, senior government officials said on Thursday, January 18.
Among the measures recommended to be implemented in the budget to be placed before the Indian Parliament on February 1, 2018, at behest of the local industry, is the scrapping of the 2.5 percent import duty on steel scrap.
The Joint Plant Committee, an industry representative body under the Ministry of Steel, also advocated cancelling import duty on scrap to ensure higher raw material availability to the local industry arc furnace steel producers, the officials said.
The officials stated that it has been communicated to the Finance Ministry ahead of the budget that the reduction of import duty to nil will be in line with the Ministry of Steel’s stated objective to ensure that at least 40-50 million mt of additional steel production of the targeted domestic steel production of 300 million mt by 2030, will be accounted for by scrap-based induction arc furnaces.
Also, in line with this, to augment domestic generation of steel scrap, the bill to mandatorily scrap commercial vehicles over 15 years old will be put forward for approval during the forthcoming budget session of parliament.
The commercial vehicle scrapping policy once implemented has the potential to generate an additional 13 million mt of additional steel scrap per year, the officials added.
The national budget is also expected to reduce import duty on ferronickel from 2.5 percent to nil, also as per the recommendations of the Ministry of Steel, the officials said.