Aluminium industry officials are set to meet Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia next week and pitch for a safeguard duty on the lines of one on steel products in a bid to check cheap imports from China and the Middle-East.
Following the imposition of 20 per cent provisional safeguard duty on steel products by the government, industry body Aluminium Association India (AAI) is readying its case for a similar duty, sources said.
The association is collating data for all primary and rolled products to strengthen its case and its members are slated to meet the Revenue Secretary next week, they added.
last month, the association members -- Vedanta Group CEO Tom Albanese, Hindalco Deputy Managing Director D Satish Pai and Nalco CMD T K Chand -- met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and urged him to raise the import duty on the metal.
Indian producers are facing a double whammy of cheaper imports and meltdown in global prices. Since April 2011, primary aluminium prices at the london Metal Exchange (lME) dropped 42 per cent to $1,540 a tonne in August this year from the earlier $2,623 per tonne, an AAI official said.
Aluminium hot metal cost of production (excluding interest and depreciation) on the domestic front has risen 29 per cent to Rs1.2 lakh a tonne from Rs93,700 due to increase in cost of power, logistics and introduction of the Renewable Power Obligation and a clean energy cess, he added.