Coal Secretary News

State-owned Coal India is likely to miss the production target by 20 MT and may end up producing up to 578 million tonnes this fiscal due to a string of issues, including evacuation and demand-supply, a top official has said.

In order to bring down coal imports at a faster rate, public sector units (PSUs) in the power sector will follow "zero imports" policy from the next fiscal onwards, a top official said on Thursday.

Coal imports during July declined by 11.1 percent to 18.03 million tonnes (MT) on the back of higher domestic availability of the fossil fuel.

Former Coal Secretary H C Gupta, accused in several coal scam cases, on Saturday took a U-turn in a city court by withdrawing his plea seeking to take back his bail bond on the grounds that he had no money to hire a lawyer and would fight the case from jail.

The government will allocate 16 coal mines to state-run utilities for commercial mining by September, Coal Secretary Anil Swarup said on Tuesday.

 Government said on Monday that coal imports have declined by 5 percent to 14.52 million tonnes (MT) in October over the year-ago period.

With government's renewed focus in increasing coal production in India, coal imports have fallen 27% year on year.

Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik's request for allocation of Talabira-II coal block to HINDALCO was approved by him on the advice of then Coal Secretary PC Parakh and examined by PMO officials, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told the CBI.

A special court on Tuesday ticked off the CBI for not supplying all papers to the accused in a coal scam case, saying it was "creating problems" and directed the agency to provide a 200-page document to them within a time- frame.  

Special CBI Judge Bharat Parashar asked Gupta and Jain to cooperate with the probe while granting them bail on personal bond of Rs one lakh each and surety of a like amount.

The government wants state-run CIL to keep coal prices low for cheaper power tariff, a top official said on Thursday.

Government on Thursday said it will auction 10 coal mines in the third tranche with reserves of 858.19 million tonnes for steel, cement as well as captive power plants and the process will be completed by August end.

Coal India has mined enough coal to be able to meet the needs of power plants for the next 40 days, Coal Secretary Anil Swarup said, a comfortable stocks position for a country used to summer blackouts and large imports of the fuel.

Linkages are assured supply commitments from Coal India to a company that has an end-use plant and needs fuel to run it.

Till now, 29 blocks have been auctioned and another 38 allotted to the state-owned entities.

The government is taking steps to ensure hassle-free transportation of coal from remote mines, apart from increasing its production capacity, coal secretary Anil Swarup has said.

Nripendra Misra, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had written earlier to the Coal Ministry regarding the contingency plan to deal with the implications of the Supreme Court's judgement on coal block allocation.

Coal India has 148 on-going projects which are under different stages of implementation.