Steel Safeguard Duty

Think of a safeguard duty as different from a normal import tax, a normal tariff is usually permanent policy, but a safeguard duty is specifically a temporary emergency brake, applied only when a genuine surge of imports is proven to have caused serious injury to a domestic industry, and structured to phase out on a fixed timeline rather than stay in place indefinitely.

India applied exactly this emergency brake to steel flat products starting April 2025, after finding that a surge of imports, much of it originating from China's oversupplied steel sector, was genuinely hurting Indian mills, the duty runs in three distinct phases, 12% for the first year, easing to 5% in year two, then rising back to 11% in year three, a deliberately front-loaded structure giving domestic mills the sharpest protection when the injury was freshest.

The duty deliberately excludes several specialty steel categories, oriented electrical steel, stainless steel, electro-galvanized steel and certain nickel alloys among them, reflecting a targeted approach, protecting the commodity-grade flat steel segment where Indian mills were genuinely losing ground to import surges, while leaving specialty categories, many already covered by their own separate anti-dumping duties, outside this particular measure.

Watching what happens when this safeguard duty finally expires in April 2028 is a genuine test of the policy's purpose, if Indian mills can compete with import prices without the duty's protection by then, it will have done its job as a temporary bridge, if imports surge back the moment it lapses, that tells you the underlying competitiveness gap was never actually closed.