The commerce ministry has recommended anti-dumping duty of Rs 1800 per tonne, and if this is implemented foundries will have to face closures.Already the industry is in deep trouble with over 50 per cent of the units having closed till date.

Soda ash producers have joined hands with pig iron producers in opposing the proposed dumping duty. Ferro alloy producers are also opposed to the duty.India has very limited reserves of coking coal and even what is available is with high ash content. There are not many countries in the world which have low ash coking coal. Australia, Canada and to some extent China have good reserves and are large exporters.

In South Africa coal is abundant but coking coal is scarce and its exports are banned. India will have to depend on large scale imports of cokingcoal and coke to run its steel, pig iron, ferro alloys, foundry and other industries.

Chinese exporters raised their base prices, but even then they are very competitive.

Tproduced by members of the Industry and Commerce Association, Dhanbag not the product they need.

It said that "the Dhanbag units produced coke from indigenous coals which have a high ash content ranging from 27 to 40 per cent and therefore were not suitable for blast furnace application." It is also doubtful whether any of the Dhanbad units could detail contents of carbon and ash in the coke produced.

The state run Bharat Coking Coal (BCCL) and Durgapur Projects Ltd. are the main producers of merchant coke apart from the private coke units which have now come up. BCCL reportedly has a capacity of 35,000 tonnes per month and was now producing 15,000 tonnes of hard coke. It would be interesting to know how much BCCL produced even in those days when it had no competitors.And as a leading producer of coke whether it would guarantee thequality of the coke it produces and sells.

Chinese coke poses real problem to those coke producers who import their coking coal from Australia which is priced very high. The delivered cost to India may be around $70 per tonne.

Roughly 1.6 to two tonnes of such coal are needed to get a tonne of coke and therefore price of such coke may be over $200 per tonne.

The question is whether the country can afford such a costly product? The solution for the problem is not imposition of dumping duty on Chinese coke but to see whether BCCL and DPL can improve the quality of the coke they produce, introduce differential pricing based on ash content and compete effectively with imported coke.

As far as the new coke making units in the private sector based on imported coking coal are concerned they may be integrated with pig iron producers or they will have to close down. It is interesting to note that despite all the adverse circumstances Kudremukh Iron Ore Company wants to put up a large coke making unit on theWest Coast.

But the unit may have a chance as it will serve its own pig iron unit which is coming up in Mangalore.