Govt asks state power firms to stop imports, buy coal from CIL

"We have coal but there aren't many takers for it. It is in this context that let me request the delegates from the states which are currently importing coal should immediately stop the imports because Coal India will offer coal to them," Union Coal Secretary Anil Swarup said during the inauguration of a two-day conference on power here.

He said all the states, specially the generation companies, can work out a strategy to see how they can totally eliminate import of coal for the purpose of power generation.

"We have a very ambitious target of about a billion tonne of coal production by Coal India by 2020. But the problem is that if we are not going to pick up the coal which we are producing now (which is 550 million tonne) then what we will do with the one billion tonne of coal that we are coming up with," he said.

Therefore, it is necessary to plan for realistic requirement of coal in coming few years, Swarup said. Coal India has set up a whole set of process for auctioning the coal for private companies and as much as 8 million tonne will be offered every month to regulated power sector or to be picked up by private sector.

"As far as state gencos are concerned, we are open for discussion, you (gencos) give a number and we will provide you the coal that you want," he added.

Swarup also appealed to the states to commence work on the coal blocks allotted to them. "We have taken pride in coal block allocation or coal block auction. But the problem is that some of the coal blocks allocated to some of the state governments have not started producing coal. 

"This is serious in terms of loss of revenue to the state government. The more you mine from there the more benefit would be accrued to the state. Centre does not gain much out of it," he said.