Industry association FICCI has objected the Coal Ministry’s recent decision to increase coal rakes for the power sector citing that the decision will lead to a coal crunch for captive power plants of other industries.
Pradeep Tandon, chairman of FICCI’s Chhattisgarh council, in a letter to the Secretary Coal on December 4, requested the Ministry to intervene in normalising coal and rakes to CPPs of DRI and steel plants steel by earmarking at least 50 rakes per day for these non-regulated sector.
The letter comes two days after Coal India announced it was enhancing rake supplies for power sector to 296 rakes per day to increase coal stocks at power plants to 14 days from the current 10 days’ stock.
FICCI believed the decision will deprive the consumers of non-regulated sector (NRS) from getting sufficient coal rakes leading to a coal crunch similar to what was recently witnessed by the NRS during August-November months.
In November, 255 rakes out of 272 rakes allocated were supplied to power sector, while NRS was provided only 17 rakes against their requirement of around 50 rakes per day. The proposed plan for December also envisages only 26 rakes per day for NRS.
Recently the association for captive power producers had also requested the Centre to normalize coal supplies to industries with CPPs.
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