Coal news and updates

Ministries meet to ensure higher rakes availability

March 4: Top officials from the ministries of coal, power and Railways met on Monday (March 2) to discuss ways to improve rakes availability for despatches and supply of coal from the mines of Coal India Ltd (CIL) and Singareni Collieries Company Ltd (SCCL), an official told ICMW.

“The coal companies were facing difficulties in despatching coal due to lower availability of rakes and as such a meeting was called on Monday,” the official said.

“Though it is not clear what exactly transpired at the meeting but at the end it was agreed that Indian Railways will try to provide 250 rakes per day for loading of coal to CIL subsidiaries from now onwards,” the official said.

The company was getting on an average around 222 rakes per day till date, the official added.

Incidentally, CIL was lagging behind its despatch target till February, which grew by only 3.61% to 441.85 mt during the first 11 months (April-February) of 2014-15 from 426.44 mt during the corresponding period of 2013-14.

However, the company’s production grew by 6.80% to 436.96 mt during the same period from 409.13 mt.

CIL has a target to despatch 520 mt of coal in 2014-15 but, going by the current trend, the company is set to miss the target by a huge margin. Not only despatches, the company is also lagging behind its production target of 507 mt for the year.

ICMW estimates that CIL’s total despatches during the current financial year would hover around 485 mt while production too would be in the same range.