First-ever National Chemical Policy Soon: Ananth Kumar

With a view to boosting chemical sector in the country, the Government of India will come out with a national policy on chemicals in a couple of months, Chemicals and Fertilizers Minister, Ananth Kumar said on Friday (04 December).

“Our national policy on chemicals, first ever in independent India is finalised, we have already sent it to the cabinet and I think very soon we are going to have a national chemical policy, which will be having some niche things like national chemical development centre, which is going to promote research and development,” said Kumar at Assocham meet.

"We are also going to have one national chemical safety centre and a national bureau of corrosion control, said the union minister. We have taken all the industry inputs, it has been circulated to various ministries and we are getting comments and finally the union cabinet will decide and promulgate the first ever national chemical policy of the country since independence," he added.

Enabling the chemical industry, environment, infrastructure and duty structure, will be the objective of National Chemical Policy, he said.

“We will also see that they petrochemical complexes not only manufacture the feedstock but, do value addition to that, there will be downstream and processing industries and government of India will create them,” said the union minister.

Only four out of total 16 refineries in the country have petrochemical complexes.

India require 4.5 lakh plastics engineers every year but we are producing 44,000 only and most of them are going abroad, getting placed before they complete their courses.

There are only 23 Central Institute of Plastics Engineering and Technology (CIPET), the government has decided to increase the number of centres to 100 in couple of years, he added.

The biggest task ahead of the chemical sector is to make India a net exporter of chemicals and petrochemicals.

“Our total exports are worth $19 billion and imports are $27 billion, there is a need to reverse this trend,” said Kumar.