Government should repeal the proposed Quality Control Order with regard to steel imports else it would adversely impact India's international trade relations, an industry body has said.
Under the proposed Steel and Steel Products (Quality Control) Order, 2015, government is set to bring several steel products under a mandatory Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) registration.
In its letter to the Steel Ministry, the Federation of Industries of India (FII) has said that Quality Control Order is nothing but an effort to create barrier to stop import of Hot Rolled (HR) Coil steel essentially required to bridge the gap between industry's demand and supply by domestic steel producers.
"...The proposed Quality Control Order, 2015, if not withdrawn by the Steel Ministry, would have a massive adverse impact on our international trade relations as no foreign country or their companies, would go for cumbersome BIS registration procedure for the sake of exporting small quantities of steel, occasionally to a few engineering companies in India," FII said in the letter.
It said the Control Order would dent relations with countries like Korea and Japan.
"The foreign companies are equally competent to introduce same kind of non-tariff restrictions on export from India. Under such restrictions, how our PM's Make In India programme would become a success here, if other countries stop our exports through similar non-tariff restrictions," it said.
FII also said that there is hardly any reason for the Steel Ministry to protect 4-5 major domestic steel producers through this route.
"The steel producers should follow anti-dumping or SG route to check dumping of steel, if any, happening in India and not through the mandatory Control Order route," FII added.
It has asked the Steel Ministry to give instructions to officials not to proceed with the proposed order and also spare time to discuss the issue with FII and other steel consumers likely to be affected by this order.
According to data provided by FII, India's imports of non-flat steel products constituted 2.3 per cent of domestic production in 2014-15.
While, import of flat products constituted 14.17 per cent of the domestic production and import of alloy steel made 28.7 per cent of domestic production.
