Team News Riveting
Kolkata, January 5
Coal India Limited (CIL) continuing to keep pace with its capital expenditure ended the first nine months of the financial year in progress with a capex of Rs 10,717 crore posting a strong 37.4 per cent year-on-year growth.
Capex during April-December’20 was Rs 7,801 crore.
In the process, CIL’s capex spend during this period marked 86.3 per cent of the progressive target achievement and 63% of the fiscal’s total budgeted target of Rs 17,000 crore.
The capex scale up comes at a time when the Centre has urged the public sector entities to step their annual capex spend.
“Capex is a key performance area which has a rating value of 15 per cent in our Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that we enter into with Ministry of Coal at the beginning of the financial year” said a senior executive of the company.
Land procurement, purchase of heavy earth moving machinery and joint ventures primarily HURL and Talcher Fertilizers Limited together at Rs 5,786 crore accounted for 54 per cent of the total capex spend during April-December’21.
Construction of coal handling plants/silos at Rs 1,344 crore and rail sidings and rail corridors at Rs 1,265 crore made up for nearly quarter of the entire capex spend. CIL has plans to accelerate its evacuation capacity through rail mode by an additional 330 million tonnes per annum by FY 2024 through strengthening its rail infrastructure.
Capital expenditure on land procurement, crucial for developing new and expansion mines which would help ramp up coal output subsequently was Rs.2,490 Crores during April-December’21. This represents 121 per cent of the target achievement which for the progressive period was Rs 2,057 crore. Growth in capex under land head is a whopping 54 per cent over last year same period.
Procurement of HEMM at Rs 2,031 crore overshot the progressive target by 14 per cent during the referred period. CIL in a bid to expand its mining fleet has been fast tracking the process of procuring high capacity, technologically advanced machinery of different types and sizes. Primarily deployed in the company’s opencast mines, the major source of the company’s coal production, these machines would help in removal of overburden and coal extraction.
CIL’s capex will be contingent on the demand for coal, sales realization and production needs. The investments will be made accordingly” said the executive.
