National Steel Policy

Imagine a country that needs enormous quantities of steel, for buildings, bridges, cars, machinery, every year for decades to come, and has to decide whether to keep importing whatever its domestic mills can't supply, or to deliberately build enough of its own capacity that importing becomes the exception rather than the norm. India's National Steel Policy, first framed in 2005 and substantially rewritten in 2017, is the government's answer to exactly that choice, decisively in favour of building domestic capacity.

The 2017 policy replaced the earlier 2005 version specifically because India's growth ambitions had outgrown the original targets, it set a considerably more ambitious goal, 300 million tonnes of steel-making capacity by 2030, alongside a push toward higher-grade specialty steels rather than just basic commodity-grade output, and a genuine focus on domestic raw material security, iron ore and coking coal in particular.

By FY26, India's steel capacity had reached roughly 220 million tonnes, meaningful progress toward the 300 million tonne target but still leaving real distance to cover in under five years, a gap the PLI Specialty Steel scheme covered elsewhere on this site was specifically designed to help close by pulling in fresh private investment into the higher-value steel grades ordinary capacity expansion alone wouldn't deliver.

Every time you read that India has become the world's second-largest steel producer, that ranking exists because of capacity built under this exact policy framework, a two-decade, deliberately sequenced government bet that domestic steel-making capacity was worth building at scale rather than permanently relying on imports.