The government had recently imposed a 20 percent safeguard duty on HRC for 200 days, but that has not been enough, says Sundararajan, adding that other measures like a minimum floor price for imports will also be considered. In addition, the steel ministry is talking with the commerce ministry and finance ministry for co-ordinated efforts to reduce the stress in the steel sector, she says. Sundararajan says state-owned steel firm SAIL 's losses will start reducing once the company's expansion plans are completed and it is able to achieve economy of scale. She expects the company to turn operating profits by the end of this fiscal and report a net profit by the end of next fiscal. Yesterday, RBI Governor Raghuram rajan had said that steel was one of the biggest problem areas in the economy because of huge over capacity. Below is the verbatim transcript of Aruna Sundararajan's interview with Latha Venkatesh & Sonia Shenoy. Latha: We keep hearing that the government is looking to support domestic steel companies from cascade of ultra-low priced imports. What is the latest that you are contemplating? How much of an import duty or any other measure? A: You are right. The government is fully aware of the unprecedented situation that the steel industry in the country is facing. We have already imposed safeguard duty of 20 percent but that has not been enough to stem the tide of imports. So currently we are looking at a basket of measures, we are looking at what can be done in terms of the safeguard duties being extended to other products. We are looking at what can be done to impose measures like minimum floor price. We are also looking at how we can work both with the commerce ministry and finance ministry to see what kind of comprehensive range of measures that can be taken to address the situation. I cannot give the exact figures now because these are currently being discussed and finalised between the ministries but in the coming few weeks we will have fairly tough measures to ensure that we have a level playing field in the country. Sonia: Currently the safeguard duty of 20 percent has been imposed on hot rolled coil (HRC), is that correct and will that be extended to cold rolled coils (CRC) soon? A: Not just CRC. We are looking at extending it to a whole range of products, semis as well as niche goods because there are lot of things that are affected and we cannot have a situation where you impose duty on one category of steel and then products start coming in in another category. So whatever we do, we are looking at effectively dealing with the situation. Latha: Will you put a minimum price. The point is the moment a duty is imposed; the landed cost gets adjusted by that level. Is there something like a minimum below which you will not allow import say USD 300 or whatever is considered cost of production? A: What we are looking at currently is to see what can be a minimum floor price and in fact we have asked the industry also to give us figures on what are the cost of production, so that we can see what kind of a floor price we can look at.
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