Over India’s increasing coal thrust and state owned miners inability to fulfill the demand, has pushed Coal Ministry to work on more options for coal supply.
To increase the domestic supply, the Ministry is formulating policies that can help captive mine holders to sell surplus Coal to Power, Steel and Cement producer who have undeveloped mines or no Coal linkages with CIL.
Ministry may allow the captive Coal miners to sell their surplus Coal soon at the Coal India prices to other companies.
Allowing captive miners to sell surplus Coal could challenge CIL which has the monopoly in Indian Coal mining industry.
Proposal of surplus Coal sale by captive miners will go to the Cabinet Committee on investigate soon.
A government official mentions to media that, “The committee has proposed that captive Coal blocks with surplus production be allowed to sell, albeit temporarily, to units in select sectors that requires Coal.”
“The policy on surplus Coal will ensure that we have more liberal regime in place, instead of one-offs where the approval of Coal India is required for the production of any surplus Coal”, the official added.
Another senior official mentioned, “The rationale behind the proposal is that, users are in any case entitled to a captive mine and there is no harm in providing them coal until their mines turn operational. This will ensure they do not import much”.
The Chaturvedi committee was set up in June this year, to suggest ways of utilizing surplus Coal from captive mines, to bridge the deficit in domestic production. After that the Association of Power Producers (APP) suggested the idea of banking 25 MnT of surplus Coal from captive mines.
Steelmint noted that if the surplus Coal selling policy is implemented, then it will decrease reliability for Coal in CIL and its monopoly will end.
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