New policies in New Delhi are born the way a blast furnace is blown in: with ceremony, with tonnage, and with a confidence that the heat will look after itself. The Ministry of Steel’s National Steel Policy: Vision 2047 is no exception, and it deserves to be read, first, with appreciation.
The document now in circulation is ambitious. It takes India’s crude steel output of 170 million tonnes (MT) in 2025-26, and installed capacity of 220 million tonnes per annum (MTPA), and plans for 604 MT of capacity by 2047. It plans for 505 MT of finished steel consumption, per capita use of 302 kg (up from 116 kg) and 45 MT of exports. It lays out a four-phase decarbonisation ladder:
energy efficiency and renewables until 2030
coal gasification and best available technologies until 2035
green-hydrogen direct reduced iron (DRI) until 2040
carbon capture (CCUS) for the residual thereafter
Along that ladder, emission intensity falls from 2.54 to 1.54 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of crude steel. It proposes a Steel Industry Safety Council with a Directorate that can audit every producer in the country. It proposes a Steel Digital Centre of Innovation within the Steel Research and Technology Mission of India (SRTMI), a national scrap drive modelled on the Swachhata Abhiyan, and a review of its own projections every five years. Few sectoral policies have been this thorough about their own sector.
Thoroughness, however, is not completeness. The National Steel Policy of 2017 promised 300 MTPA of capacity by 2030-31. Its successor now projects 294 MTPA by 2030. The target has quietly rolled over, and the policy says nothing of why it was missed. A reader who has sat on the other side of the table, drafting such documents, learns to read them twice. The first reading is for what they say. The second is for what they leave unsaid.
The Charge Mix Is Missing Its Ingredients
Every furnaceman knows that the heat is decided by the charge mix: so much hot metal, so much DRI, so much scrap, so much flux. Get the proportions wrong, and no amount of oxygen lancing will rescue the tap. The policy is meticulous about its demand for each input. It is curiously silent about where those inputs will come from.
Take coking coal. The policy concedes that about 92% is imported and projects demand rising from 72 MT to 236 MT. It does not say what share will still be imported in 2047, and it sets no domestic production target. It is silent on price risk from a supplier base concentrated in Australia, the United States and Russia.
Imported metallurgical coke is not mentioned at all. Non-coking coal for DRI, set to rise from 68 MT to 167 MT, lives only in an Annexure table.
On iron ore, the policy pronounces India “self-sufficient”, then admits that the high-grade share of reserves fell from 70% to 46% in three years. It proposes overseas mine acquisitions for high-grade ore. That is a plan to import, and it is not quantified. Nor is there any word on the export of fines and pellets, or on the duty regime that governs them.
Steel trade is treated as one aggregate, 6.5 MT in and 6.6 MT out. There is no breakdown by product, though hot-rolled coil is the product over which every safeguard battle is actually fought. The intermediates the small mills buy and sell (pig iron, sponge iron, nuggets, briquetted iron) have no trade chapter at all.
And then there is the arithmetic. At the policy’s own assumed 95% yield, 531 MT of crude steel gives about 505 MT of finished steel. That is exactly the projected domestic consumption, with nothing left over. The 45 MT export target has no tonnage to come from.
What the policy needs, and does not have, is a material balance sheet for 2047. For each input it would show what India mines, what it imports and what it exports, and what that does to the import bill and the rupee. Without it, Atmanirbhar steel means self-reliance in capacity, not in what goes into the furnace.
The policy also leaves out money. There is no assurance on GST, no stability window for customs duties on scrap, coking coal or ferro-alloys, and no grandfathering for investments made in reliance on the policy. The fiscal vocabulary amounts to three items:
“rationalisation of statutory levies” on mining
unquantified “remission benefits” for exporters
Viability Gap Funding for slurry pipelines
Trade remedies (anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguard duties) are temporary by design. An investor planning a thirty-year plant is asked to trust a document that promises to revise itself every five.
The Loha Mandi Is Not on the Map
Now read the policy as a Punjabi would. The word “Punjab” does not appear in it. Neither does Mandi Gobindgarh, the old Loha Mandi that rolled the bars of independent India’s first building boom, nor Ludhiana. The policy names no State at all. Its map of secondary steel clusters is a scatter of unlabelled pins, one or two of them hovering somewhere over the Sutlej.
Three omissions matter.
First, the policy plans a contraction of the induction-furnace route it never discusses. The main text says only that the induction-furnace (IF) share, about 38% today, “is expected to decrease”. The assumptions beneath the Annexure’s raw-material table set it at 15% by 2047. For Gobindgarh, whose economy runs on induction furnaces and re-rolling mills, that is the most consequential sentence in the document. It sits in a footnote. There is no transition path, no modernisation fund and no cluster scheme with money attached. The secondary sector, holding 47% of national capacity, is offered skilling, “forums” and “facilitation”.
Second, the policy ignores the green plant already standing in Punjab. On 20 March 2026, Tata Steel commissioned its first scrap-based electric arc furnace at Hi-Tech Valley, Ludhiana. It cost about ₹3,200 crore, has a capacity of 0.75 MTPA, runs on 100% scrap, uses nearly half renewable power, and is designed for under 0.3 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of steel. That is the plant the policy’s Phase I describes in the conditional tense, and it is already tapping heats, and it goes unmentioned. Tata says it intends to buy its raw material and sell its rebar within a 400-km radius. That is the same scrap pool and the same TMT market on which Gobindgarh lives. The policy does not ask how one branded electric arc furnace and a whole cluster of small induction furnaces are to share one northern scrap supply.
Third, the policy leaves its one Punjab institution unplaced. The National Institute of Secondary Steel Technology (NISST), named repeatedly as a skilling vehicle, is headquartered at Mandi Gobindgarh. The policy cites it without once noticing where it stands, or that it could anchor a northern Centre of Excellence.
Downstream, the stakes are larger still. Ludhiana’s fasteners, hand tools, bicycles, auto components and tractor parts are steel users, and increasingly exporters into a European market where the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) now applies. Every trade remedy that lifts the domestic price of coil or wire rod is a cost to them. The policy says remedies should be “proportionate”. Punjab needs that word given a mechanism.
What Needs to Be Done
The fixes are neither expensive nor exotic. Six of them would do.
Publish a 2047 material balance sheet, input by input, with import shares, export policy for ore and pellets, and product-wise trade targets for coil, long products and intermediates. Then reconcile the 45 MT export target with the production arithmetic.
Draw up a northern scrap balance for Punjab, Haryana, Himachal, Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh. Back it with a network of registered vehicle-scrapping facilities drawing on the region’s ageing tractor and vehicle fleet, so that Ludhiana’s new arc furnace and Gobindgarh’s old induction furnaces are not bidding each other into ruin.
Set out a funded transition path for induction-furnace clusters. That means common ladle-refining and testing facilities at Mandi Gobindgarh and a technology upgradation window for the move from IF to EAF, with NISST upgraded into the Centre of Excellence for the north.
Hook steel into the logistics already built. The Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor begins at Ludhiana. Steel-handling terminals, mini-rakes for scrap and DRI, and a multimodal park on that corridor belong in the logistics chapter. So does PM GatiShakti, on which I have already written to the Cabinet Secretary this month.
Give fiscal certainty in five-year windows, matched to the policy’s own review cycle: stable duties on scrap, ferro-alloys and coking coal, and a GST and remission regime an investor can bank on.
Give Punjab its share of the State’s role. Industrial power tariffs and open access are State subjects, and induction furnaces live or die by them. The Government of Punjab should not wait for New Delhi. It should notify a power-tariff stability package for the Gobindgarh and Ludhiana clusters and seek a seat for their associations on the proposed Safety Council and Skill Working Group.
A national policy, like a heat of steel, is judged at the tap, not at the charging. Vision 2047 has the tonnage and the ambition. What it lacks is a sense of place. Punjab has already shown the country what low-carbon steel looks like. The least the policy can do is find Ludhiana and Gobindgarh on its own map.