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ONE MINISTRY FOR STE EL & MINES IS A RECIPE TO REDEEM BOTH
At what rate steel demand grows in rural India, home to about
70 per cent of the population, will depend on the quality of market promotion work and steel companies' engagement with buyers through dealer networks in about
600,000 villages. The challenge is to initiate rural folk to use steel in all kinds of
construction and take the material to their
doorstep in the quantities they need. Sustainability of rural steel demand will have
much to do with the country's ability to
achieve at least four per cent annual farm
growth. After crop harvesting and tending of fields for the next round of cultivation, growers must be left with enough
Narendra Singh Tomar
surplus to build pukka houses and grain storehouses.
RIDE AHEAD?
In the last three years of the United Progressive Alliance government, the Indian steel sector had a torrid time. Bureaucrats
and industry officials, especially those belonging to public
sector undertakings (PSUs), were subjected to
hellfire and torment by a whimsical minister
from a small town of Uttar Pradesh. He would
take delight in running down his officials in
public, without letting them know where he
wanted the country's steel sector to be in the
next five or 10 years.
The minister had a one-point program of using PSUresources to promote projects in his
borough and select parliamentary constituencies in his state to curry favour with his party's
top bosses, who were seen as indulging him. None of his spon- SMOOTH
sored projects would find justifica- A likely positive for the steel sector is an improvement in rural For this to happen, farmers
demand, in the wake of 4.7% growth in agricultural production will have to be enabled to
tion on economic grounds.
in 2013-14
take bad weather such as the
Though he went on blundering, India's per capita steel consumption is 58 kg, against the global
below-normal monsoon foreboth as a minister and a politician, average of 250 kg; rural per capita steel use is only 14 kg
The challenge is to initiate rural folk to use steel in all kinds of cast for this season in their
he was tolerated by th