India beats Japan to become world’s second largest steel producer -Governance Now

India beats Japan to become world’s second largest steel producer

Steel minister lays emphasis on the need of safety in the production of iron and steel

GN Bureau | January 29, 2019

#steel producer #India #Japan #iron #steel #Chaudhary Birender Singh #SAIL #RINL #OMDC

Steel minister Chaudhary Birender Singh has India has become the second largest producer of steel in the world leaving behind Japan and the USA.

He said when comparing the country’s per capita consumption of steel vis-a-vis the world consumption level which is 214 kg per capita, India has a long way to go. He said before 2014, India’s per capita consumption of steel stood at 57 kg which has now increased to 69 kg per capita.

Singh was chairing the parliamentary consultative committee meeting in Goa recently.

He laid emphasised on the need of safety in the production of iron and steel. The minister recognised the need to prevent injuries and accidents and for providing a healthy working environment and mitigating hazards and risks, he has decided to set up a safety directorate to oversee safety standards in the steel industry. It will be made functional soon. Singh said both the SAIL and the Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited (RINL) have comprehensive safety policies.

On the issue of mining, the steel minister said by 2020, large number of the mining leases will expire, which the ministry has taken cognizance of and is taking measures to tackle it. The mining activity of Orissa Minerals Development Company Limited (OMDC), a CPSE of steel ministry, is shut for the past few years and efforts are also on to make OMDC mine operational.

The minister said the National Steel Policy 2017 envisages steel capacity of 300 million tonne (MT) which will be affected if mining activities are not smooth. He also said besides the existing mines, there is a need to focus on exploration of new mines.

He said along with National Steel Policy formulated in 2017, the policy for domestically manufactured iron and steel products has also been finalised to give preference to domestically produced steel. This has given impetus to the Make in India initiative and has also led to savings of around Rs 8,000 crore.

He further said the National Scrap Policy is also being formulated which will be ready in a few months. This will make available nearly 7 MT scrap in the country. Presently the requirement of scrap is around 8.3 MT and most of it is met with scrap imports. He said that steel produced out of scrap is of good quality and is environment friendly.

Comments

Other News

Climate change is stealing sleep

Climate change has at least doubled the temperature-related sleep loss across 1,338 major cities worldwide over the past five decades, highlighting an emerging but often overlooked public health consequence of rising global temperatures. A new study by Climate Central estimates that between 2020 and

Cabinet approves Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme

The union cabinet chaired by PM Narendra Modi has approved the Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme (MPMS) with a budgetary outlay of Rs 62,500 crore. It aims to further scale up the production, deepen domestic value addition, strengthen supply chain resilience, enhance global competitiveness. It

Building infrastructure is only half the job

Recent stories of stolen railway wires, disappearing communication towers and missing public infrastructure are often treated as bizarre law-and-order failures of India. Yet they raise a more fundamental question. Why does the State often discover the disappearance of a public asset only after it has alrea

New Delhi’s Indo-Pacific strategy enters a new phase

India appears to be investing fresh dynamism in its Indo-Pacific strategy. At the time when the US, under president Donald Trump, has adopted a conciliatory approach towards China and has changed the name of America’s Indo-Pacific Command to just Pacific Command, India has quietly moved towards con

CAG flags major fiscal lapses in Maharashtra

Maharashtra`s fiscal management has come under sharp scrutiny after the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, in its State Finances Audit Report for 2024-25, flagged significant budgetary inefficiencies, accounting irregularities, understatement of key fiscal indicators and widespread governanc

The health sector research we are not doing

Some neglect is loud. This kind is quiet. It sits in research never commissioned, data never collected, questions never asked. In South Asia, that quiet has let the region’s worst health problems stay understudied, underfunded, and out of sight of those who could act.