Coal news and updates

Despatches are main concern at SCCL: CMD

December 11: The increase in production in recent months due to favourable weather conditions has become a cause for worry for coal miner Singareni Collieries Company Ltd (SCCL) as it is unable to despatch the material on lack of timely availability of rakes, a top official of the company told ICMW.

“Everything is almost fine but despatches are a major concern at present,” SCCL’s CMD Sutirtha Bhattacharya told ICMW over phone.

“Despatches have been affected to some extent due to lack of availability of rakes but, hopefully, things will improve soon,” he said.

Bhattacharya, however, said it is not that railways are to be entirely blamed for lack of availability of rakes.

Summing up, he said, “Whenever we have coal, the rakes are not available and whenever rakes are available, we do not have coal to load!”

According to him, there is a need to better manage the rolling stock situation to improve loading of coal.

SCCL’s coal production in November stood at 4.57 million tons (mt), which was the highest production for the current financial year (2013-14) and exceeded 4.24 mt reported for October.

During the first eight months (April-November) of 2014-15, SCCL’s total coal production stood at 30.154 mt. The annual production target of SCCL for 2014-15 stands at 55 mt. In 2013-14, SCCL’s production stood at 50.47 mt.

However, the company’s off-take during the month stood at only 4.41 mt. Its off-take during the first eight months (April-November) of 2014-15 stood at 33.541 mt.