All the issues that you have named are there. But if we say that in China there are no issues, I would not agree with that. In India, we have issues of land, of labour, of getting finance because the cost of finance is very high. But then, we have a lot of advantages too. We have a huge market. We have 1.35 billion people living in this country which give us a huge market. Therefore, we can go on tom-tomming that we are not getting land. But why? Because we want land in Gurgaon. The auto industry will say oh! I want to set up a plant in Chennai, I want to set up a plant in Bangalore. You do not have to do that.

If you want to get land, you can get land maybe 100 kilometres from Bangalore or 100 kilometres from Delhi, where you can get any amount of land. There is no problem. Yes, finance is expensive in India but you can borrow in dollars. You will get international rates of finance in dollars. Then you have created your own imports and exports, you create a dollarized balance sheet.

So if you want to do it, if you are steadfast in your thought process, if you decide that you really want toto make Atmanirbhar Bharat, then these are all excuses and then you just have to go out there and you have to say that I will make the product and I will not bring the raw material from China. I will bring it from some other parts of the world if they are not available in India and manufacture the finished products in India. In the bargain, if you need some support from the government, I am 100% sure this government will definitely support the people or the companies who want to create an alternate to China.

It is a very important point. Right now, what is keeping me busy is how to digitalise the company, how to automate the process because the steel industry is as heavy as any industry can get to be. It is the heaviest industry in the world and also it is a highly manpower intensive industry.

But given today’s environment with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and digitalisation, a lot of things can be done. As they say, never waste a crisis because every crisis brings an opportunity. We are not letting it go by and we are working to modernise our facilities. Our facilities are probably the most modern facilities in the world. But we are now looking at industry 4.0 wherein we are trying to make it absolutely state of the art as far as processes are concerned.

For example, our locos which are moving hot metal from the blast furnaces to the steel melt shop, have two people working on it. First we are reducing one person and then we are going to make the process autonomous. So that loco will start from point A and will automatically stop at point B without any man into any phase. We are doing many things like that. Work is going on at a very high pace by now as we speak.

We are constantly working on cost cutting and improving the processes so that we can reduce the cost of operation and reduce the carbon footprint by improving our operations. All those things are now showing very good results. Indian steel is probably the most competitive in the world, maybe even much more competitive compared to China because we have our iron ore. That is a very big strength. Plus, we have a very high quality of steel manpower and a huge home market. These three factors give us a huge advantage and by building very modern and very state-of-the-art steel plants, our costs are probably the lowest in the world. These factors have helped Indian steel industry to become the most competitive or most profitable steel industry in the world. Going forward, India should be the steel producer of the world, not China.

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