Immediate removal of hurdles in environmental clearance of coal projects and public-private partnership in coal transportation are necessary to improve availability of the fuel in the country, coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal said on Thursday at the Energise India conference organised by the Economic Times.
"Development of required infrastructure for coal movement from the production centres to the consuming centres and strengthening port capacities to handle imports is a challenge . Public private partnership in developing these areas would be a desirable approach for quick solution to the issues ," he said at the conference.
Jaiswal said the captive mining policy for augmenting domestic production had not yielded the desired results and the sector should have been opened for commercial mining in line with the energy sector reforms that followed in the early nineties.He said the government was seeking consensus on commercial mining of coal to promote competition in the sector. Coal meets about two-third of the country's energy requirements but several customers, particularly power plants, are facing a severe shortage because many new mines have not been able to start production due to delays in environmental approval.
Transportation of coal is another bottleneck in the sector. Coal India Ltd chairman NC Jha said about 70 million tonnes of the fuel was piled at company's various mines due to lack of mode of transportation. Coal India requires 175 rail rakes per day during 2011-12 as against the average availability of about 162 rakes. The company mined 452 million tonnes last year and does not expect any growth in production this year.
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