India remains the bright spot in the global steel ecosystem with a steady growth in domestic demand and a projected healthy future growth. The steel demand in the
country is estimated to grow at 9% in both 2025 and 2026 compared to a decline in 2025 and just 1.3% growth in 2026 in global demand, according to the Short Range Outlook of the World Steel Association (WSA), released last October. Indian steel demand will continue to grow in the coming months driven by persisting growth in all steel using sectors, the report said.
Vindicating the WSA’s observation, India's crude steel production has grown by a huge 10.5% during the first nine months of calendar 2025, between January and September, compared to the same period a year ago. Significantly, among the top ten global steel producers, the US was the only second country that witnessed an increase in production (2.6%) during this period. China, the global leader with more than half of the world's production , registered a decline of 2.9% during January-September 2025 against the same period of 2024. The aggregate global steel production has declined by 1.6% during the period.
India is the world’s second-largest producer of steel, with an output of 151.14 million tonnes of crude steel production in 2024-25. The growth has been steady and persistent with the steel production increasing by more than two and a half times during the last ten years.
Higher steel production does not only indicate India’s bigger role in the global production ecosystem, it reflects the country’s ongoing industrial and infrastructure development activities. One of the primary forces behind industrialisation was the increasing use of metals. Steel has traditionally occupied the top spot among metals. Steel production and consumption are seen as measures of a country's economic development because it is both a raw material and an intermediary product.
Steel is an important multifunctional and adaptable material that plays a key role in making lives convenient. Being the basic raw material of a large number of manufacturing activities steel forms the backbone of national economic development. The industry is often considered as an indicator of the economic progress because of the critical role it plays in infrastructural and industrial development of a country.
Steel production rising
India's steel industry although boasts of ancient roots, seen in artefacts like the Iron Pillar of Delhi, but its modern growth began with Jamsetji Tata founding the first iron and steel plant, Tata Iron and Steel Company at Jamshedpur in Jharkhand (then Bihar) with a production capacity of one lakh tonnes in 1907. It’s part of the history now. Tata Steel has grown manifolds over the years and is now among the top steel producing companies in the world with an annual crude steel capacity of 35 million tonnes.
