NEW DELHI: State-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) would achieve the 780 million tonne (MT) output target for the financial year 2023-2024 with all efforts and means available at its disposal, said newly appointed Chairman P M Prasad on Saturday.
Prasad succeeds Pramod Agrawal who stepped down on June 30 on attaining the age of superannuation. Before CIL’s top post, he led Jharkhand-based Central Coalfields Limited. Prasad, a three-an-a-half decade coal mining veteran is a postgraduate in mining engineering from the Indian School of Mines, IIT Dhanbad.
He began his CIL career in 1984 as a management trainee at Western Coalfields Limited and served in different capacities across different subsidiaries of CIL. He also had a three-year stint in NTPC as executive director (coal mining).
Meanwhile, coal production in Q1FY24 shot up to 175.5 MTs, the highest-ever recorded during the first quarter of any year, with nearly 10% growth. Expansion in volume terms was 15.7 MT, which is significant as it came over a high base of 159.8 MT in the previous fiscal.
Production for the month of June at 58 MT grew by 6.4 MT, posting a double-digit growth of 12.4% compared to 51.6 MTs in June 2022. “Output could have been even higher but for the heavy rainfall in the last week of June across our mining areas”, said a senior executive of CIL.
India’s largest coal producers said that total supplies during the quarter that ended June 2023 were 187 MTs posting 5.3% growth compared to 177.5 MTs of Q1 FY 2022. The volume increase was 9.5 MTs. Non-power sector consumers continue to receive higher quantities of coal in the current fiscal, which the first quarter ended at 33.4 MTs, logging a robust growth of 34%. During the comparative quarter, last fiscal supplies to this sector were 24.8 MTs.