Coal India Ltd (CIL) hopes to get environment clearances for some of its pending projects by the end of this month.
The projects are expected to play a key role in helping the company scale up annual production by 180 million tonnes (mt) during the current Plan period (2012-17).
“We recently got clearance for one project and one or two other projects are in the pipeline,” CIL chairman S. Narsing Rao told newspersons.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the launch of a special campus edition of
December production
CIL expects to produce 46 mt of coal this December. The company had produced about 39 mt in November, he said.
In November, CIL had lost approximately 4 mt of production and 1.5 mt offtake on account of the combined impact of Cyclone Nilam and festival holidays.
As on the last week of November, the company’s overall production was up approximately 7 per cent to 260 mt and despatches had gone up nearly 8 per cent to 287 mt. The company has to produce around 204 mt of coal in the remaining 125 days to achieve its targeted production of 464 mt for the current fiscal.
Price hike
CIL, the chairman said, is not considering any price hikes as of now, though he admitted that the cost of production had gone up substantially following the diesel price hike in September of Rs 5 a litre.
“I don’t think there is any such proposal under consideration now. Time to time, we take stock of the cost of production and then decide," he said.
Diesel forms a major cost component in coal production. “For every rupee’s rise in diesel price, our cost of production goes up by around Rs 100 crore,” Rao said.
shobha.roy@thehindu.co.in