India imported 3.49 million tonnes of finished steel in April to August 2026, 29.5% more than a year earlier, and stayed a net importer even though exports rose 34%. China was the largest source, at 31.8% of the total. This happened with a safeguard duty on flat steel in force: 12% in its first year, 11.5% since 21 April 2026, 11% from next April. Domestic steelmakers have asked for a duty above 20%. The steel ministry, according to a Reuters-based report of 7 October, is unlikely to tighten curbs, because domestic prices are already high.

Two corrections to the story as it circulates. The “seven-year high” in Chinese steel imports is a headline from 2024 and 2025, not from this year; no 2026 China tonnage was found for this piece. And the ministry’s regular open houses on “steel import issues” are not about the safeguard duty at all. They deal with the Steel Import Monitoring System, its simplified SARAL SIMS route and exemptions from quality control orders. The import rules that decide who can bring steel in are as important as the duty, and much less discussed.

Demand grew faster than output

The chart explains most of it. Steel consumption rose about 7% in the first five months of the year, while finished steel production rose 4.1% and crude steel output 2.8%. Imports and exports both jumped, but imports are the larger share of the gap: 3.49 million tonnes in, 2.99 million out. The year-earlier base was also low. Finished steel imports fell 34% in April to October 2025, to 3.8 million tonnes, according to earlier government data, in the first months of the provisional duty. The comparison base is therefore low, and a 29.5% rise is not by itself a record; this piece did not find the 2024 figure for the same months.

Joint Plant Committee provisional data as reported by trade press (Steelorbis, SMM, Chartforest, Reuters-based reports) in September and October 2026. A few trade-press pieces carry different April–August import figures (about 2.5 Mt, with China at 0.8 Mt, up 69%); they appear to describe another year and are not used here. The monthly “An Overview of Steel Sector” files on steel.gov.in cover April to July and were not opened.

What the duty does and does not cover

Finance ministry Notification No. 02/2025-Customs (SG) of 30 December 2025 (Gazette of India, Extraordinary, CG-DL-E-30122025-268941), read in the Gazette of India’s own text via the SansadSaar index of the archive.org Gazette of India collection. It sets 12%, 11.5% and 11% for the three years; a trade summary that gave the second-year rate as 5% was wrong. The duty covers hot-rolled, cold-rolled, metallic-coated and colour-coated flat products. Imports at or above set CIF prices (US$675 a tonne for hot-rolled coils, sheets and plates, $695 for plate-mill plates, $824 for cold-rolled and $861 for metallic-coated), and imports from listed developing countries (with exclusions that differ by product, China among them), are exempt; CBIC Circular 23/2026-Customs of 7 May 2026 explains how to claim the exemptions. Stainless steel and some special steels are outside the scope.

The duty is lower than it sounds in two ways. It steps down each year, so imports pay 0.5 percentage point less this year than last. And it has exemptions: an import priced above a set CIF threshold, or from a listed developing country, does not pay it. The size of the exemptions matters: no published figure for the share of imports that actually paid the duty was found, so it is not known how much of the 3.49 million tonnes was dutiable. Stainless steel, which more than doubled in imports, is outside the safeguard altogether.

The other import rule: registration and quality orders

Imports of covered steel products have to be registered on the Steel Import Monitoring System. The ministry has made that lighter: SARAL SIMS lets small importers register consignments of up to 10 tonnes, with an annual limit of 1,000 tonnes, and the regular form was cut from 56 fields to 20. The ministry also said it was revoking the requirement of a no-objection certificate for grades not covered by a quality control order. Quality control orders, which require BIS certification for steel products, have been suspended or relaxed for some products in 2026, among them various stainless steel items from 27 April, as reported. The reported end date of that stainless exemption differs between sources (26 October 2026 in one, 31 March in another), and stainless steel producers have asked for the order to be reinstated, citing a 65% year-on-year rise in April stainless imports.

This is the policy that the open houses on steel import issues deal with. Each session lets importers and industry bodies raise registration and exemption problems one at a time. The ministry publishes the date and the signup rules; no published record of what was raised or decided was found.

Who pays

A higher duty protects producers and costs users. Domestic steel prices rose in August and September, after a firmer demand picture and higher coking coal prices, and MSME users in Coimbatore have asked for a six-month suspension of import and safeguard duties, citing a rise of ₹8,000 to ₹10,000 a tonne between August and September. That figure is a trade-body claim, as reported, and is not a measured price series. The ministry’s reported position, no further tightening for now, sits between the two sides, and an anti-dumping case on hot-rolled steel from China, Japan and Russia is already open as a second route.

The data needed to judge the question is thin. Import volumes by product and country appear monthly in trade press from the Joint Plant Committee, but the safeguard exemptions, the SIMS registrations by importer type and the open-house outcomes were not found in any published form that would let an outsider test who benefits.

How it came together

What would fix this

• The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs should publish each month the volume of flat steel imports that paid the safeguard duty and the volume exempted, by exemption route (CIF price threshold, developing-country list), so the effect of the duty can be separated from the headline import numbers.
• The Ministry of Steel should publish SIMS registrations each month by product, country of origin and importer category, including how many came through SARAL SIMS, from the portal it already runs.
• The Ministry of Steel should publish a short note after each open house on import issues: the categories of issue raised and what, if anything, was changed, so the sessions become a record rather than a closed meeting.
• The Ministry of Steel and the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade should keep one public list of steel quality control orders and their exemptions with the start and end date of each, to remove conflicts such as the dates reported for the stainless steel exemption.
• The Directorate General of Trade Remedies should publish a timetable and the injury data for the hot-rolled steel anti-dumping investigation, and report domestic and import-parity prices by product alongside the safeguard review, so users can see what a duty change would do to their costs.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.