The Indian government has denied any scarcity in domestic availability of iron-ore and refuted reports that the country will be a net importer by 2020.

“There will be no shortage of iron-ore, even in 2020, when Indian steel production is projected to rise to 100-million tons a year,” Mines Minister Dinsha Patel says.

“Indian steel production is about 67-million to 70-million tons a year. It requires 1.6- million tons of ore to produce one-million tons of steel. Indian iron-ore production was 210-million tons in 2010 and fell to 167-million tons following a ban on mining in Karnataka. Even then there is no dearth of iron-ore,” he says.

Iron-ore production in the country has been steadily falling in the wake of a ban imposed in the southern Indian province of Karnataka a year-and-a-half ago, and a similar ban across the western coastal province of Goa in October 2012.

Mining is currently per- mitted in the eastern province of Orissa but with severe restrictions on transportation.

Indian iron-ore exports during the ten-month period between April 2012 and Jan- uary 2013 were down 68% to 16.35-million tons, compared with the previous corresponding period.

According to an official in the Mines Ministry, the govern- ment’s denial of the iron-ore shortage for domestic steel production was prompted by a series of reports put forth by analysts over the past few months, which predicted that India would turn into a net importer of iron-ore as early as the next fiscal year.

The official says that the mining industry’s contention that the quantity of iron-ore imports is higher than exports, indicating a shortage of raw material, is fallacious.

It was pointed out that Indian exports consists almost entirely of iron-ore fines which are not used by domestic steel mills, while imports are largely of high-grade lumps. Since the two are not comparable, higher iron-ore imports than exports do not have a major impact on domestic steel production since domestic availability of lumps, barring a few geogra- phies, has not been impacted.

The Mines Ministry also doubts the accuracy of export-import projections made by the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries, the mining industry lobby group. While it has fore- cast double-digit iron-ore imports of between 10-million to 12-million tons during 2012/13, the actual figure is expected to be around eight-million tons.

As for exports, while the industry body has been forecasting a single-digit volume, the actual export in 2012/13 is expected to close at between 17-million and 18-million tons.