Coal India again ‘drops’ tenders for procurement of Heavy Duty Dumpers

With the Ministry of Coal setting ambitious targets for Coal India to achieve production of 1 Billion tonnes by year 2020, the PSU and its subsidiary NCL have recently gone about cancelling 2 tenders of 190 Ton dumpers for 28 and 18 units respectively.

Although these tenders were floated late last year wherein 5 international manufacturers took part , Coal India in its usual style took  a long time to evaluate the technical bids and finally decided to cancel both the tenders citing ‘administrative reasons’. This despite the fact that new government has taken up the challenge of augmenting domestic coal production and put necessary policies in place, the behemoth coal PSU continues to function in it’s old style as far as procurement of high capacity mining equipment is concerned.

The question that arises is whether CIL has again buckled under pressure from the Tipper manufacturer lobby (25 – 35 Ton truck makers) for not procuring high capacity mining dump trucks, as this will render their huge fleets of low capacity trucks without work?

Interestingly, another tender floated by CIL late last year for 44 units of 240 ton dumpers is proceeding further wherein, as per our sources out of the 5 bidders only 2 are left in the race. Out of the last two , one of them is Caterpillar- a major American mining equipment manufacturer. 

Millennium Post is privy to information that despite  a major flaw in this American company’s techno- commercial bid,  the Technical Committee of Coal India  has kept it’s bid alive ! Rumours have it, that this is the usual policy adopted by Coal India in all its major tenders  to ultimately have the ‘Big 2’  (one American and other Japanese) as ‘qualified bidders’ while the rest are rejected on some pretext or the other. A senior CIL source stated, that the matter of favouritism in case of the ongoing 240 ton dumper is under the scanner and may be taken up by the CVC.

It is pertinent to note that despite its tall claims on increase in coal production, Coal India continues to thwart its own tenders since 2006 , which was the last time that tender for heavy duty dumpers materialised. In that particular case also the performance and availability of the 240 Ton dumpers  at SECL, supplied by US-based Caterpillar came under a cloud and was probed by CVC.