Withdrawal of export duty on iron ore: Industrialists fear rise in cost

Tribune News Service

Neeraj Bagga

Amritsar, November 20

Local industrialists using steel and iron ore as raw material in their industries are upset with the Centre for making rapid changes in its policy on the trade. They said the Centre had now withdrawn the 15 per cent export duty on steel products and iron ore that it had imposed some months back, upsetting their calculations. The holy city is a leader in rolling out nuts and bolts besides having units requiring steel as raw material.

The government should come out with a quarterly Budget if it doesn’t want to stick to the norms set in the annual Budget. — Samir Goyal, a Nut & Bolt manufacturer

Samir Goyal, a nut and bolt manufacturer in the city, said frequent shift in the government’s policy forced him to shut down another unit within a month of its setting up. He elaborated that he procured machines worth Rs 2 crore from Taiwan about seven months back. However, he managed to run it only for a month as the government changed its policy. Today, it withdrew the export duty while the import duty on iron and steel was imposed only about five months back.

Goyal suggested that the government should come out with a quarterly Budget if it did not want to stick to the norms set in the annual Budget. “It seems that the government is a puppet in the hands of a few people,” he alleged, adding that he had received nearly 200 notifications from GST, Customs and other departments.

Kulwinder Singh, another industrialist dealing in steel said the international business scenario has drastically changed in the last four months. The prolonged war between Russia and Ukraine caused all round inflation which resulted in an uncertain scenario. “So, the impact of the withdrawal of 15 per cent export duty on steel products and iron ore would be known only after sometime.”

A young entrepreneur Sirjan Singh, manufacturing weighbridges, a kind of scale used for weighing trucks and selling these across India and abroad, felt that the withdrawal of duty would be a boost to steel manufacturing industry as it was expected to increase exports. “At the same time, it was likely to lead to an increase in prices of steel in the domestic market which will adversely affect various industries in India such as automobiles, energy, construction, machinery and others as the cost of raw material will dramatically increase,” he observed.

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