“We should be making steel in India, not only for India but for the world. India has a great opportunity to export a lot of steel because most of the big steel exporting countries import iron ore whereas we have our own iron ore. It is a great opportunity for us to add value to our iron ore, create jobs in economically weaker parts of the country and build a large-scale globally competitive industry,” says TV Narendran, MD, Tata Steel.

The government has rolled back the export duty that had been imposed on steel and iron ore. Your view vis-a-vis the impact on Indian steel industry?

We had appreciated the fact when the government took a call in May to bring in export duty for inflationary concerns. We were assured it was temporary and so I am glad that it has been removed because I firmly believe that India is a great place to produce steel.

We should be making steel in India, not only for India but for the world. India has a great opportunity to export a lot of steel because most of the big steel exporting countries import iron ore whereas we have our own iron ore and steel plants are normally built in some of the most porous parts of the country. So it is a great opportunity for us to add value to our iron ore, create jobs in economically weaker parts of the country and build a large-scale globally competitive industry. So we welcome the move.

In addition to this, there are still a couple of challenges like the coking coal prices as well as raw material. So in addition, what are you looking forward to from the government?

Coking coal obviously is an issue because we do not have too much of coking coal but we can do better to make use of the coking coal which is available in the country. There is more of what we can do. We are talking to the government about that but largely we are dependent on imports for coking coal.

It comes from Australia, Russia, Mozambique and other places and that is something that we need to really think about because as the Indian steel production goes up, the coking coal requirements will also keep growing. We really need to solve this problem going forward.

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