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Ambarish Mukherjee

New Delhi , Aug. 3

THE Government proposes to set up a dedicated fund to help the domestic steel producers on the export front.

This is keeping in mind that the improved performance of the steel companies during the past one-and-a-half years is mainly on account of exports along with certain modifications in the existing export credit guarantee schemes.

The draft National Steel Policy 2003 (NSP-2003), circulated by the Ministry of Steel earlier this week, suggests creation of a dedicated fund styled: `Steel Exports Guarantee Fund.'

Though no specific amount has been mentioned in the draft policy document as an initial corpus, it has been suggested that the corpus will be built up with seed money from the Centre and refundable contributions from the industry to meet specific requirements of the sector.

To give a further boost to exports, the draft policy has stated that export credit guarantee schemes should be suitably modified to cater to the needs of large funds required for steel exports.

The policy forwarded by the Government to the main steel producers further states that steps shall be taken to create warehousing facilities in select overseas locations as joint ventures between the Government and other interested parties in order to bring down inventory costs and facilitate timely delivery in the overseas market.

To fight out the various trade barriers created by the developed economies to prevent Indian steel exports, the draft policy harps upon joint efforts by the industry and the Government to build up database to fight trade cases. According to the draft, the database will consist of information about international prices, case histories, data on subsidies in other countries, export volumes, sectoral consumption, domestic cost of production and capacity, etc. Simultaneously, the NSP-2003 suggests that steps shall be initiated to find out the inherent costs, both quantitative and qualitative, being incurred due to poor infrastructure facilities like inadequate rail/road facilities, bottlenecks at ports and uneconomic vessel sizes.

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