The government is faced with the daunting task of increasing coal production and ensuring timely supply to the plants.
As the government struggles to ensure fast supply of coal to power plants to meet the rising demand due to the prevailing heat wave conditions across the country, the Coal Ministry has set an ambitious production target of 700 million tonnes in the current financial year. target has been set. Year 2022-23, which will also ensure adequate supply to the power sector in future.
To increase production, the government is also auctioning coal blocks for commercial mining.
The Ministry of Coal had started commercial auction of coal in June 2020, however, almost two years later, out of 292 mines put up for auction in four rounds, only 42 mines have been successfully auctioned in three rounds.
According to official sources, the bids for the fourth round of auction were opened on March 2, 2022, where two or more bids were received for 5 reserves, while only single bids were received in 6 coal mines.
The commercial coal mining auction process has received a slow response, hampering the government’s objective of increasing coal production through this route.
Coal India too had clocked a production of 478 million tonnes between the April-January period of 2021-22, even though it plans to take it to 700 million tonnes in the current fiscal.
Sources said though the government has set a stringent production target for Coal India for the current fiscal, commercial coal auctions have not yielded the desired results and besides there is an increasing demand for coal by power utilities.
Logistics issues are being faced to transport the coal to the power plants.
All these factors present a formidable challenge before the government, which today forced Power Minister RK Singh and Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav to brainstorm to resolve the logistical issue of fast supply of coal to power plants.