The Hindu Business Line : House panel says CIL funds utilisation poor

THE Parliamentary standing committee on coal has expressed concern at the poor rate of fund utilisation by Coal India Ltd (CIL) in procuring heavy earth moving machines (HEMM) as well as the low capacity utilisation of these machines.

In its report submitted to Parliament, the committee has stated that the fund utilisation for this purpose had been below 50 per cent during the last two to three years and it is even worse for Singareni Colliery Company Ltd (SCCL).

According to the report, while the financial target for procurement of HEMM for fiscal 2001-02 was Rs 1,063.32 crore the actual utilisation was only Rs 454.02 crore. For fiscal 2002-03 the target was fixed at Rs 1,072.40 crore, the actually utilisation stood at Rs 562.05 crore only. The target for 2003-04 was Rs 1,140.27 crore but the actual utilisation figure was not available at the time of preparing the report.

In the case of SSCL, the report says that for fiscal 2001-02, 2002-03 and 2003-04, the utilisation of funds by the company was 33 per cent, 65 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively.

While admitting that court cases had delayed fund utilisation in some cases, the committee notes that such bottlenecks and problems have been solved. Therefore, it has recommended that from the current year there should not be any such delays and funds allocated to the coal companies should be utilised to the fullest extent.

The committee has also asked the coal department to make a time-bound programme for procurement of equipments and machines and some senior official should be given this responsibility. It has expressed serious concern over the losses to the coal companies in terms of fall in production as well as productivity caused due to non-utilisation and under-utilisation of these HEMMs.

To sort out this problem of poor utilisation of these machines, the panel has suggested that wherever there are surplus machines or spare capacity is available, CIL should make arrangements for their diversion to some other subsidiary where there is shortage of machines for their fullest utilisation.