Coal India to focus on higher offtake

Coal India will focus more on strategies for higher offtake of coal during the current fiscal, company chairman S Narsing Rao said.

"Our production potential is 525 million tonne but our target for 2013-14 is 482 million tonne. This is due to lack of evacuation bottlenecks," he said.

Lack of new railway tracks for new mines despite the higher availability of railway rakes will deter the increase in CIL's coal output.

Allying fears of coal shortage at power plants, Rao said, "We are committed to supplying coal to any generating power plant with a firm PPA with a power distribution company."

The current pithead stock of coal for CIL is 58 mt and aggregate stock in power plants is close to 20 mt (16 days' supply).

Rao said the company had supplied 132.84 mt to NTPC in 2012-13 - a growth of 14.7 per cent over 2011-12.

The supply to NTPC was 105 per cent of the contracted coal quantity for the year, he said adding out of 492 million tonne of coal offtake target, supply to the power major will be 377 million tonne.