The government has not yet decided on fixing minimum import price (MIP) for steel, Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia said today.
"No decision," she told reporters when asked if the government has decided on MIP for steel.
Up to last year, India's imports stood at about 9 per cent of what it used and this year, it's somewhat higher. The record level was around 15 per cent.
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 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.
But the downstream sector that uses steel favours continuing access to low-cost imports.
The steel sector is a major contributor to the burden of non-performing assets of state-owned banks, which are saddled with gross 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.
