Coal India remains optimistic

Kolkata, March 30 : Coal India is planning to reduce its production cost by improving productivity and efficiency and remains optimistic to be competetive even as the Central government is allowing commercial coal mining for the private sector, its chief said on Friday.

CIL is planning to increase its capital expenditure to Rs 9,500 crore in 2018-19 to strengthen its production capacity, Chairman and Maging Director Gopal Singh told reporters here said.

“Allowing commercial minning is an opportunity for us. We have been the market leader and will remain so. We have been focusing on reducing cost and improving productivity and efficiency,” he said.

“Our target is to produce coal at a lesser cost than that of the commercial miners,” he said, adding the state-un miner achived 10.9 per cent growth in profit before tax during October- December period of current fiscal as because it maged to reduce cost by Rs 52 per tonne.

Singh also said its coal prices have been cheaper by 42-64 per cent compared to imported coal even after the price hike in January.  CIL would focus more on mechanisation and automation in a bid to increase its production, he said.

According to him, CIL has exceeded its planned capital expenditure by Rs 100 crore to Rs 8,600 crore in the current fiscal. “Our capital expenditure would be Rs 9,500 crore to increase our capacity,” he said.

CIL produced 495.09 million tonnes (mt) during the April to February period of the current fiscal and it is expecting to close the year with a production of about 568 mt, against a target of 600 mt for 2017-18. CIL, which had a target to produce 531.32 mt during the eleven month period, clocked a 1.4 per cent growth in production from 488.06 mt produced in the same period of 2016-17, its provisiol data showed.  (IANS)