The Steel Authority of India (SAIL) Bokaro, India’s leading steel company has acquired a Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) license for rolling out specific standard steel used in manufacturing weather- resistant shipping containers. This was stated in an official statement by SAIL, issued on Thursday.
According to the statement, the license application is under IS 11587:1986 for ‘Weather resistant Structural Steel’ grades WR-Fe 480A (general application for weather-resistant structural steel), WR-Fe 480B (Low Phosphorus Micro-alloyed weather-resistant structural steel) and WR-Fe 490H (for container manufacturing).
The pandemic caused a huge shortage of shipping-grade containers worldwide and many containers were tied up at ports, storage facilities and vessels around the globe due to government restrictions mandating the covid crisis, the statement further said.
It was also informed that the rising demand, port congestion and closed manufacturing operations worsened the shortage, subsequently increasing the container’s freight rates immediately across the world as imposed by the shipping line. This had a brutal impact on the country’s export-import supply chain as the nation’s main supplier was China and it required about 3.5 lakh containers yearly.
SAIL further said container manufacturing in India will help the country to eliminate its dependence on China. These challenges were not restricted to the economic scale, the nation producing containers but also to the availability of raw material for manufacturing the corrosion/weather resistant steel.
According to a media report, an inter-ministerial panel under the prime minister’s office directed in June to chalk out the problem and suggested specific standard steel for container production.
The statement read that under the issued license SAIL- Bokaro steel plant will provide standard steels for making shipping containers equivalent to the steel used by Indian Railways in manufacturing weather-resistant structural/wagons.
The steel company’s import substitute production is likely to strengthen the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat, the statement added.
