Team News Riveting
Kolkata, July 1
The new Chairman of Coal India Limited (CIL), P M Prasad underlined his priority and said the mining major would achieve the 780 million tonne (MT) output target of FY 2024 with all efforts and means available at its disposal.
Prasad on Saturday took over the command of world’s largest state-owned coal producer. He on supply side, ensuring uninterrupted coal flow to the power sector is another priority area. Before donning the mantle of CIL’s top post he led the Jharkhand based Central Coalfields Limited – a CIL arm – to its production target achievement in FY 2023.
Prasad, a three and half decade coal mining veteran, is a post-graduate in mining engineering from Indian School of Mines IIT Dhanbad. He succeeds Pramod Agrawal who stepped down on 30 June on attaining the age of superannuation.
Prasad began his CIL career in 1984 as a management trainee at Western Coalfields Limited and served in different capacities across different CIL’s subsidiaries. He also had a three-year stint in NTPC as Executive Director (coal mining).
Bolstering CIL’s 780 MT target chase, production during Q1 FY 2024 shot up to 175.5 MTs, the highest ever recorded during first quarter of any year, with near 10 per cent growth. Expansion in volume terms was 15.7 MTs which is significant as it came over a high base of 159.8 MT in similar quarter previous fiscal. Production for the month of June at 58 MT grew by 6.4 MTs posting a double-digit growth of 12.4 per cent 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. CIL’s over burden removal (OBR) continues its runaway pace as CIL excavated 497.5 million cubic metres (M.CuM) of OB during April-June 2023 period with the comparative period growth hovering high at around 30 per cent.
“This is an encouraging signal for us that facilitates faster future production,” said the executive. Total supplies during the quarter ended June 2023 were 187 MTs posting 5.3 per cent growth compared to 177.5 MTs of Q1 FY 2022. Volume increase was 9.5 MTs. Non-power sector consumers continue to receive higher quantities of coal in the current fiscal, which at the first quarter end at 33.4 MTs logged a robust growth of 34 per cent. During the comparative quarter last fiscal supplies to this sector were 24.8 MTs.
