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Coal India will get a unique gift this festive season — a brand new corporate headquarters on the eastern fringes of Kolkata.
The ₹188-crore ‘smart’ building located in the the plush Rajarhat area — dotted with IT campuses, luxury hotels, malls and corporate establishments — is a stark contrast to ‘Coal Bhawan’.
Located in a congested area in the central business district, Coal Bhawan has been the registered headquarters of CIL ever since the company was created in November 1975.
“We will shift to the new office by Puja (end-September). The 2.7 lakh square feet office can accommodate all the 800-plus employees in Kolkata, and comes with residential facility for directors,” says CIL’s Director (Technical) N Kumar.
Due to paucity of space at Coal Bhawan (at Netaji Subhas Road), there was a pressing need to move to the new office. Some of the key departments are located at a rented space at Apeejay House, Park Street, the high street of Kolkata.
CIL recently lost a case with the property owners, and is now legally bound to vacate the premises by October. The Park Street office was the headquarters of Coal Mines Authority Ltd (CMAL), created in 1973 after the nationalisation of coal mines.
The property was originally a city office of the erstwhile Ranchi-based National Coal Development Corporation that was created in 1956, by acquiring all mines operated by the Railways.
During nationalisation (1971-73), NCDC was brought under the fold of CMAL. The latter became the sole authority for thermal coal mining.
Coal Bhawan While the search for a corporate headquarters was on, CMAL traced a property in its list of inheritances through NCDC. It was rechristened ‘Coal Bhawan’. But who was the original owner of the property? No one in the CIL family has the answer, except that it was built in 1905, when Kolkata was the seat of power of British India.
Mani Shankar Mukherjee, a noted Bengali novelist, however reckons that back in the 1950s it was the office of South British Insurance, a top insurer of the bygone era.
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