Ludhiana: As soon as the new government was formed at the Centre, the SMS mafia has become active again, due to which there is an atmosphere of panic among the industrialists. For the last five years, the mafia has been ruining the business of industrialists by manipulating the prices of steel and increasing and decreasing the prices arbitrarily. Steel companies fought a long legal battle against the SMS mafia, but they did not get any major success. Expressing concern over this development, the All Industries Trade Forum (AITF) has written a letter to the concerned authorities demanding a ban on the sudden fluctuations in steel prices. AITF President Badish Jindal said that the SMS mafia fixes the prices of steel in the country in an unauthorized manner. The mafia changes the prices 4-5 times a day and sends the prices fixed by it through more than one million WhatsApp platforms across the country.
Behind this fluctuation in prices are traders dealing with lakhs of tonnes of scrap and steel, who order the SMS mafia to increase and decrease the prices according to their situation. Due to such a large number of SMS being sent, the industries consider the prices sent by them as the basis. Jindal said that the mafia has reduced the price of steel by Rs 4,000 per tonne in 20 days. On June 4, the price of steel ingot was Rs 47,500 per tonne, which was reduced to Rs 43,500 per tonne on June 25. There is no basis for this reduction, because there has been no major reduction in the prices of foreign scrap, but the prices of scrap coming from the industries here have been reduced. Similarly, this SMS mafia had increased the price of steel ingot from Rs 42,000 per tonne to Rs 48,000 per tonne in April and May, which gave the steel mafia a profit of billions of rupees and when this mafia sold all its stock, the price of steel came down. According to information received from sources, now these big speculators are again accumulating stock at low prices and the SMS mafia will keep the prices low until they accumulate a large stock and as soon as sufficient amount of stock is accumulated, this mafia will again increase the prices heavily in the coming days. The AITF president said that because of their fraud, steel furnaces that make iron from scrap have started shutting down.
