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CIL, arms stressing on IT to check pilferage: Goyal

Coal India and its subsidiary companies are emphasising on electronic surveillance to obtain accurate data of production, despatch etc as mines have a large number of entry/exit points and physical surveillance of the area is almost impossible, said Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (I/C) in the Ministry of Coal, Power and New & Renewable Energy, in the Lok Sabha recently.

A large number of such points have been connected with wide area network to obtain data on a real time basis.

The main objective of the various IT initiatives, he said, are two-fold: Electronic surveillance to check theft and pilferage and capture of real time data of production, despatches, stores etc to improve operation efficiency.

An integrated system has been conceived consisting of a GPS/GPRS-based vehicle tracking system with RFID, CCTV and boom barrier connected through a wide area network connecting all vulnerable points like weigh bridges, material stores, entry/exit points, stock yards, sidings, explosive magazines etc.

The objective is to track the movement of vehicles from the time it enters the mine area, ie, coal dumps/store yards to sidings along its route. Alerts are received in the form of an exception report when a vehicle violates defined routes, for instance, stoppage for longer time en-route, deviation from the designed route, etc.

The minister said the status of different IT initiatives, along with their implementation time lines for CIL and all its subsidiaries have been fixed.