Steel Minister sets ambitious India target

India’s Minister of Steel Jyotiraditya M. Scindia reportedly has expressed confidence that his nation is poised to become the largest steel producing country in the world at some future point.

Media outlets based in the country, including the New Delhi-based Business Standard, have quoted Scindia as having made the remarks at a recent metals and minerals conference.

“Our target policy and focus also has been to turn India from just another player in the steel sector to becoming a force to reckon with,” he is quoted as saying Tuesday at the conference. Scindia also offered that India “has moved from becoming the net importer of steel to the net exporter of steel,” according to the Business Standard.

The Minister of Steel also said India’s per capita consumption of steel had increased from 57.8 kilograms (127 pounds) in 2013-14 to 78 kilograms (172 pounds) currently. Overall, India’s government intends to reach 300 million metric tons of steel production annually by 2030, Scindia said, up from 118.1 million metric tons in 2021.

The 2021 figure comes from the Brussels-based World Steel Association (Worldsteel), which also indicates India has produced 73.3 million metric tons in the first seven months of this year. That puts India on pace to grow its steel output by 8 percent this year to roughly 127.5 million metric tons.

Although China seems to be fading from its peak steel consumption output, down 6.4 percent year to date according to Worldsteel, it remains a lofty target for India. In the first seven months of 2022, China has produced more than 600 million metric tons of steel compared with India’s 73.3 million.

In terms of ferrous scrap consumption and importing, India has procured 210,000 metric tons from sources in the United States in the first five months of 2022. That ranks it just behind neighboring Pakistan at 234,000 metric tons and at a level only one-third of that of neighboring Bangladesh, which has purchased 667,000 metric tons of U.S. ferrous scrap so far in 2022.