With the coal production in all its 18 opencast and 27 underground mines coming to a halt for 24 hours, from 6 a.m. on Sunday to 6 a.m. on Monday, in response to the ‘Janata Curfew’ call given by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Singareni Collieries Company Ltd (SCCL) plans to achieve the target appear to have become increasingly difficult.
The public sector coal company has produced 64.4 million tonnes of coal during 2018-19 and the company management had fixed a pragmatic target of 66 million tonnes for 2019-20. However, production of coal has been less than that was achieved during the August-February period of the current fiscal, compared to the same period last year, mostly due to heavy rains in August and September.
Although the production has been halted for a good cause, as an attempt to break the chain of coronavirus spread, the chances of achieving the target for this fiscal appear bleak. According to officials, the company has achieved 58.1 million tonnes of coal production till February-end. With less than nine days time left in the current financial year, achieving 7.9 million tonnes production for the month of March appears a huge task now with the average daily production coming to 2.55 lakh tonnes during the month.
“A daily average production of 2.03 lakh tonnes is required even if we have to reach the production achieved last year. Achieving little over 2 lakh tonnes of coal production is very much possible during the dry weather conditions but stretching it to beyond 2.5 lakh tonnes day is a difficult task,” a senior official unwilling to be quoted said. Although the company was taking all safety measures even in the backdrop of coronavirus spread, the chances of absenteeism with scare of virus spread were increased now, the official admitted.
Except for the first four months of the current fiscal, the monthly coal production by Singareni has been lesser in the range of 3.93% to 17.1% during the August-February period of 2019-20 compared to the same period a year before. The daily average production fell to as low as 1.29 lakh tonnes in July last and the maximum of 1.9 lakh tonnes was achieved in May last.
A production 6.3 million tonnes is needed this month to reach the last year’s total production of 64.4 million tonnes, while it would be about 8 million tonnes to achieve the target of 66 million tonnes. The highest monthly production achieved this fiscal has been 5.87 million tonnes in May.
Published - March 22, 2020 09:06 pm IST
