Editorial – March 2024
Metals play a crucial role in the infrastructure development process. It calls for profound metallurgical knowledge and expertise. The production and processing of these metals pose steep challenges to metallurgists, technologists and process experts. As we all know metals form the foundation of any sustainable and growing civilization. All the ancient civilizations had a strong metallurgical understanding. Same is true in today’s era too.
Emerging concepts like circular economy, Digitalization, and Green manufacturing are reshaping the industry, while developments like EV present potential challenges to its growth. in case of special alloys, though they offer significant advantages like precise properties many companies follow the specification of their principal/ collaborator adding to the confusion at the customer’s end and also adding to inventory carrying cost. I strongly feel that there is a need to prepare a national specification for such special alloys. This will not only simplify the process, reduce the number of grades to be handled but also reduce the inventory and it’s carrying cost. Govt of India can take up this project with the help of industry experts.
Green manufacturing, in my opinion, is still at a very preliminary stage not only in India but worldwide. To
categorize any metallurgical product as “Green, one has to make the complete process chain ‘Green”, including the sources of power, all the equipment and components etc This will naturally take a long time Also, presently there are no proper parameters set for Green metallurgical products. A long way ahead!
The Indian economy has performed quite well in the past few years and is expected to continue it’s upward journey in the future too. The emphasis on infrastructure development is going to boost the metals demand in the country. The industry is going to benefit from the new scrapage policy. Also the defense is a new emerging customer sector. The present government’s policy of ‘Make in India’ will surely give a forward push to the metals demand in the defense equipment sector but mind well, supplying to defense is not as easy as supplying to a private OEM. There are lot of hurdles. It requires that the supplier should satisfy many beurocratic procedures and compliances. I hope this long chain will gradually reduce with time and also the volumes would increase. On a long term basis, defense is of course a big consumer of metals sector.
‘Metalworld has been organizing various B2B trade shows for years, fostering a dialogue among industry stakeholders. The events attract an active participation from the industry, trade bodies and also the from the relevant govt departments. I sincerely hope the industry benefits from such healthy interaction!