Coal India Ltd (CIL) will convert in to sand the overburden at its mines and sell it for construction at competitive rates, an official statement said on Tuesday. Overburden is the topsoil and earth removed to reach the coal.

CIL has already commenced the production of sand and a roadmap of the next five years has been drawn to maximise the output of sand from different coal producing companies under it. “This will make the public sector firm one of the major suppliers of sand in the near future,” the statement said.

Also read: Coal prices likely to stabilise in the current quarter; may drop in Q4

CIL subsidiary Western Coalfields Ltd (WCL) was the first one to launch this as a pilot project. The sand has been offered to Nagpur Improvement Trust at a much cheaper price for constructing low cost houses under Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana (PMAY). The price of sand is almost 10 per cent of the market price even though the quality was superior.

Growing demand

Following the success of the project and with growing demand of cheaper sand, WCL launched commercial production by commissioning the largest sand production plant of the country near Nagpur. This unit produces 2,500 cubic metre of sand per day and much of it is supplied to government units such as National Highway Authority of India, while the rest is auctioned in the open market.

CIL aims to reach a production level of around 8 million tonnes of sand within the next five years by commissioning 15 major sand plants in its different coal producing subsidiaries. By the end of the current fiscal, CIL envisages to have 9 out of 15 plants with a production of around 3 lakh cubic metre.

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