Long & informative article on the latest capitulation from the Indian side.
India will run out of iron-ore in 30 years at the rate at which it exports it to China. It could then maybe melt that Iron Pillar in Dilli to meet its needs.
Consider this from the article,
The fact is that Beijing is conserving its own non-renewable resources by encouraging its industry to meet production needs through imports. China, for example, has substantial reserves of iron ore, yet it has emerged the world’s largest iron importer, accounting for a third of all global imports. A quarter of China’s iron-ore imports come alone from India, to which it then sells finished tubes and pipes.
India’s estimated iron-ore reserves of 18 billion metric tons will last between 30 and 50 years, if the country were to boost its per capita iron-ore consumption from the present 30 kilograms to the developed world’s 300- to 400-kilogram level. China, on the other hand, has estimated iron-ore reserves of 472 billion metric tons, although the average iron content in its deposits is only 32.1 per cent. It was industrialist Ratan Tata who publicly contended that if China, with larger deposits, could treat iron ore as a strategic resource, India ought to do the same.
2 comments:
Fully agree that iron should be treated as a strategic resource and not exported to a vacuum cleaner like China.
However, the numbers seem very suspect.
How come india has only 18 billion tons and china 472 billion?
India's land mass is not that smaller than Chinas, so i find it hard to believe that china's reserves per square km at 20 times higher than indias.
What am i missing? Could it be the usual -- that india has *huge reserves* but they're unexplored and verified simply because the government has been asleep at the wheel for 60 years?
And hey, lets not make too much of a fuss about this -- japan and singapore have *no* reserves to talk about but have moved waaay ahead on the basis of economics and ingenuity.
Malaya (now Malaysia) had "huge" deposits of copper and tin. They have almost nothing left now.
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