The government will not rush into fixing a minimum import price (MIP) for certain steel products, Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today said.
The ministry has deliberated on the issue, along with the steel and finance ministries.
"We have done a fairly good amount of groundwork on it, but it's not just one item, one HS code which is affected. There are several of them which will be impacted and therefore, any talk of MIP will not have to be restricted to one or two lines (products) but may be several. But at this stage, we are not rushing into it," she told reporters here.
The domestic steel industry is mainly worried about cheap imports from China. The proposal to fix a minimum price for in-bound shipment of certain steel products is aimed precisely to keep those imports in check.
The industry's headache is the cheap imports are impacting them adversely and could jeopardise billions of dollars of investment by domestic steel companies.
The steel companies have taken huge loans for capacity expansion and are now under severe stress.
Public sector banks are saddled with gross non-performing assets (NPAs) of around Rs 2.67 lakh crore at the end of March 2015. Gross NPAs of all banks came in at about Rs 3.09 lakh crore during the same period. The steel sector is a major contributor to the NPA woes of state-owned banks.
