At a time when COVID-19 has hit most industrial operations and companies are forced to cut down on production, public sector miner Coal India (CIL)’s three lakh-odd workers are escalating productivity, which down the line has put despatches on pressure.
The company has peaked a high off producing 3.17 million tonne on March 20 this year, the highest ever single-day production, overtaking 3.14 MT that it produced on March 25 last year. Coal stocks to the country’s power stations rose to its highest at 39.48 MT, which gives an average inventory of 23 days to the power producing units.
A problem of plenty has now cropped up. Power plants, which lift the fuel from CIL subsidiary Central Coalfields (CCL), are refusing to take coal since these plants have already created stock piles of more than 35 days. These plants are now trying regulate receipts of the fuel, for which they have stopped paying.
A CIL official said while the blow has been to the CCL, the highest-producing subsidiaries have been Mahanadi Coalfields (MCL) and South Eastern Coalfields Ltd (SECL), which contributed 0.93 MT and 0.81 MT, respectively, to its single day’s highest production. These two subsidiaries make for above 50% of CIL’s production and any disturbances in these two subsidiaries become a cause of worry to CIL’s productivity.
However, despite disturbances at Lingaraj in MCL, the subsidiary has been upbeat in its production. A CIL official said the coronavirus didn’t have an impact on the productivity of the company because the miners are working as usual with the prescribed precautionary measures. Miners do not have to gather while mining and they generally operate in large areas without coming in contact to each other.
So the healthy recovery in productivity, that started from October last year onwards following slump due to prolonged monsoons, continued and production reached a new high. Against 240.93 MT in the first half of FY20, the mining behemoth produced 276.65 MT between October and February.
February witnessed a robust growth of 14.2% compared to the same month a year ago period. Coal production was 66.26 MT, the highest ever monthly production against 58.05 MT during the same month, a year ago. Coal offtake rose to 54.97 MT during February this fiscal, against 51.46 mt during the corresponding month last fiscal.
CIL loaded 256 rakes per day on an average during February this fiscal compared with 250.3 rakes loaded during February last fiscal. But, this situation has not gone down very well with CIL. Power sector consumers in order to regulate coal receipt have started filing lesser or no rail movement at all which has started increasing the pit head stock positions of CIL. The challenge going forward is to liquidate the stock since CIL has already cleared the pending rakes to both the power and non-power consumers, an official said, adding while pit head stock has started piling up, the company was yet to find out the quantum of stock.