Comments
With coal production increasing over six per cent and offtake at only 3.2 per cent during the year, logistics and coal evacuation comes into core focus for Coal India.
“Evacuation is growing at 3.5 per cent, while production is growing at more than 6.7 per cent till January 6 this year.
Unless there is evacuation, what is the point in production,” Coal India Chairman Suthirtha Bhattacharya said.
Even with this production rate, Coal India has been able to reach 96 per cent of the production target to 349.9 million tonnes (till first week of January) and is planning to bring a big push to production of 1 billion tonne by 2020.
The Coal Ministry and Coal India have turned their focus towards evacuation infrastructure.
Bhattacharya said lot of deliberations have been carried out with the ministry and internally on various models to enhance the rail connectivity for coal movement.
CIL has also roped in the just-retired Railway Board member, A K Moitra, as advisor on railway and logistics.
About 50 odd rail projects have been identified to connect with the mines.
“We are looking at various models. We pay and give the responsibility of building the infrastructure to the railways and, in return, we get freight discounts.
“The second model could be that we form a SPV which can collect freight from all the users. In these SPVs, we can also involve the state governments.
“When I was in Krishnapattam, RVNL, NMDC, port authorities as well as state government became members of the SPV...,” Bhattacharya said.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.