Comments
Coal India Ltd (CIL) has made a capital expenditure of close to ₹5,023 crore during the first half of the current fiscal primarily on land acquisition, purchase of heavy earth moving equipment and towards concluding certain high value tenders.
The capex spend during H1 ended September is a little over half of the entire capex planned for FY21 at ₹10,000 crore. The provisioned target for capex for the first half of the fiscal was estimated at ₹4,247 crore.
Among the major heads, purchase of HEMM at ₹1,360 crores accounted for 27 per cent of the total capex. It was followed by payments of around ₹12,89 crore for acquisition for mining operations accounting for almost 26 per cent of the capex. This apart, setting up important rail lines and developing sidings constituted around 21 per cent and CIL spent close to ₹1,078 crore under this head. Apart from these, CIL spent close to ₹1,297 crore on mine development, coal handling plants, silos, roads, exploration and prospecting, other plant and machinery and joint venture investments.
“This is a historic high in capex utilisation as CIL has not exceeded 30 per cent target utilization in the first half of a fiscal so far. The previous three year average of H1 capex utilization has been around 20 per cent,” said a senior CIL official.
During the April-September period, CIL clocked a capex growth of 242 per cent compared to same period last year at ₹1,467 crore (April-September’19).
“Land acquisition on fast track mode with the support of Ministry of Coal and modernisation of equipment and deployment of it in opencast (OC) mines will pave way for ramping up our production, productivity. Concurrent development of rail and other logistics will boost evacuation facilities to transport increased output,” the official pointed out.
It is to be noted that capex is one of the key scoring performance parameter in the Memorandum of Understanding that CIL signs every year with the Ministry of Coal. The Coal Ministry has been closely monitoring the progress of processes such as land acquisition, setting up of rail logistics and associated infrastructure and mine development of especially mega mine projects and speeding them up.
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.