Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: An awareness session for exporters at Vanijya Bhawan is a small event with a large implication: for the first time, what a factory emits will help set what its product costs abroad.
On 18 August the Department of Commerce, with the National Accreditation Board for Certification Bodies and the Engineering Export Promotion Council, ran an awareness session on the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism for Indian exporters at Vanijya Bhawan in New Delhi. About a hundred exporters and industry representatives attended. The technical sessions covered the CBAM framework, which products it applies to, what obligations it places on exporters, and worked case studies in iron and steel and in aluminium.
Treat that as the news peg and the structural story is easy to miss. For two centuries an exported good has been priced on its inputs, its labour and its logistics. A carbon border mechanism adds a fourth term: the emissions embedded in making it. Once one large importing bloc prices that term, every supplier into that bloc has to be able to measure it — not estimate it, measure it, tonne by tonne, plant by plant, in a form an auditor will accept. That is a change in what a factory must know about itself.
Where the measurement has to happen: The Rourkela Steel Plant. Iron and steel is one of the two sectors used as a worked case study at the Department of Commerce’s CBAM session, because integrated steelmaking is emissions-intensive and India’s finished-steel exports to the European Union are substantial.
India’s finished-steel exports to the European Union averaged ₹21,800 crore a year over 2019-20 to 2023-24, on Joint Plant Committee data. In 2023-24 they were ₹29,534 crore — about 35 per cent above that five-year average. The exposure is not hypothetical.
At a Glance
• Session: Department of Commerce with NABCB and EEPC, Vanijya Bhawan, New Delhi, 18 August 2026
• Attendance: about 100 exporters and industry representatives
• Case studies: iron and steel; aluminium
• Finished-steel exports to the EU (JPC data): 2019-20 ₹10,692 cr · 2020-21 ₹14,144 cr · 2021-22 ₹32,149 cr · 2022-23 ₹22,482 cr · 2023-24 ₹29,534 cr
• Five-year average: ₹21,800 crore a year
• Peak-to-trough swing: 2021-22 was three times 2019-20
The Indian response so far has been to build capability on both sides of the equation. On the industrial side, the Production Linked Incentive scheme for speciality steel anticipates additional investment of ₹27,106 crore and downstream capacity of around 24 million tonnes, and successive budgets have removed basic customs duty on ferro-nickel and molybdenum ores and concentrates and extended the exemption on ferrous scrap and specified raw material for cold-rolled grain-oriented steel. Newer, cleaner capacity is cheaper to certify than old capacity, so investment policy and carbon policy point the same way. On the compliance side, the involvement of the accreditation board in this week’s session is the significant detail: verification of emissions data will need Indian certification bodies that foreign regulators accept, and building that capacity domestically is far cheaper for an exporter than buying it abroad.
The volatility in the export series is itself part of the argument. Finished-steel exports to the European Union tripled between 2019-20 and 2021-22, then fell by nearly a third, then recovered. A business with swings of that amplitude cannot absorb an additional per-tonne cost it has not measured and cannot forecast. The firms that will do best under a carbon border regime are not necessarily the cleanest ones; they are the ones that know their numbers early enough to plan around them.
Two constructive priorities follow, and neither requires a new scheme. The first is that emissions accounting should be treated as export infrastructure and extended down to the mid-sized supplier, because a large exporter’s carbon number is the sum of its vendors’. The second is that India should keep pressing, at the World Trade Organization and bilaterally, for carbon border measures to recognise the developmental circumstances of exporting economies and to accept verified domestic certification rather than requiring duplicate audits. Neither is a reason to wait. The measurement has to be built either way, and a factory that can prove what it emits will find that number becoming an asset rather than a liability.
