The paper examines the performance of Indian iron and steel industry in the pre
and post-liberalisation periods in terms of primary indicators such as production,
consumption and foreign trade. It also studies growth in capacity utilisation, prices and
employment. It is deduced that the industry has grown manifold in all the aspects,
especially after the liberalisation of the economy except employment, which shows a
substantial fall during post-liberalisation when competition among the Indian
manufacturing firms has increased. Therefore, that leads us to investigate the
competitiveness of the sample firms in the industry through composite competitiveness
indices. On the basis of overall competitiveness, as well as financial and non-financial
aspects of competitiveness, the industry is mostly dominated by Tata Steel Ltd., even
though SAIL has a greater market share and proves to be superior with respect to nonfinancial
indicators. JSW Steel Ltd. stands tall on the index for ‘major producers’,
whereas Bhushan Power & Steel Ltd. leads the ‘other secondary producers’ index of
competitiveness.