Team News Riveting
Kolkata, January 3
State-run Coal India Limited (CIL) on Saturday formally signed a major procurement pact worth Rs 2,900crore with Belaz, the Belarus based mining equipment manufacturer, for purchasing 96 dumpers.
In August’20, CIL’s Board gave its nod for the procurement of dumpers having a capacity of 240 Tonne each— the highest capacity currently operational in the country that play a critical role in opencast mines.
The entire Rs 2,900 crore investment would be funded through CIL’s own finances and includes the cost of equipment along with the spares and consumables for 8 years.
For CIL whose 95 per cent of the entire coal output is through opencast mines dumpers of such high capacity are pivotal in ferrying Over Burden (OB) from mine working face to dump yard. OB is the extraneous material that overlays the coal seam, removal of which makes the dry fuel’s production easier.
The batch of 96 dumpers would be deployed in two of the large opencast mines of South Eastern Coalfields Limited (SECL), the highest coal producing subsidiary of CIL, namely Gevra and Kusmunda. While 84 machines would be pressed into action in Gevra, the rest 12 would be operationalized in Kusmunda.
The first lot of six dumpers would roll into Gevra OC expansion project within eight months from the signing of the contract. Thereafter on CIL’s green signal of their performance, after one year from the date of their commissioning, the rest 90 would follow at four machines per month. The SECL is already operating 66 machines of the same capacity and once the 96 are added, the fleet would swell up to 162.
CIL’s OBR performance has been persistently positive since the beginning of the fiscal and ending January 2021, the growth clocked a robust 20% at 1106 Million Cubic Metres. With the company confident of sustaining OBR growth momentum, the role of dumpers in transporting the extracted OB gets amplified further.
“We have been upgrading and modernizing our mining equipment to meet the future challenge of increasing the production. Especially, in the recent past we have stepped up on the procurement of heavy earth moving machinery” said a senior executive of the company. CIL placed orders worth Rs 8,688 Crores during the previous fiscal for HEMM procurement.
The purchase contract was inked in the presence of Pramod Agrawal, Chairman, CIL and Binay Dayal, Director (Technical) CIL. Petr Parkhomchyk, Minister of Industry, Belarus and Andrei Rzheussky, Ambassador of Belarus to India attended the signing event signifying its importance.
This is the second contract that CIL has sealed with Belaz, as earlier it had procured 77 dumpers of 150 Tonne capacity from the same company through a global bidding.
