NEW DELHI: Putting to rest speculations that Coal India Ltd may be broken up, government today said there is no such proposal for the state-run behemoth.
"There is neither any such proposal (to break CIL) nor are we contemplating it," Coal Secretary Susheel Kumar told PTI when asked whether the government is planning to split the world's largest coal miner.
In June 2014, Coal Minister Piyush Goyal too had said that the government will not split the coal miner but will work to smoothen the edges and improve its performance.
CIL, which accounts for over 80 per cent of the domestic coal production, is eyeing 598 million tonne production in 2016-17 and targets to produce a billion tonnes of the fossil fuel by 2020.
The firm produced 273.57 MT of coal in the first seven months of 2016-17 fiscal, lower than the target of 307 MT, even as demand for fossil fuel started picking up.
CIL produced 43.51 MT of dry fuel in October, as against the target of 51.88 MT.