“Customer is now the king for Coal India”: Joshi

Coal Insights Bureau

Coal India Ltd (CIL) should shed all sorts of discretions in its approach and attitude towards serving its customers, coal and mines minister Pralhad Joshi told the top management of the public sector miner.

The practice of putting coal in different buckets such as linkages, supply agreements and auctions should be stopped and the entire volume of coal produced should be made available to customers on demand at a time when competition from commercially mined coal is set to arrive, the minister said while addressing the top management of CIL and its subsidiaries at the Coal Minister’s Award 2020 function held recently in New Delhi.

“There should be a maximum of two buckets – one for the power sector and another for others,” he said.

Coal India also needs to prevent slippages in quality of coal to compete with private merchant miners, Joshi said.

The ministry has been receiving complaints from several state governments who have sought to check the quality of coal at their end, the minister said.

“You have enjoyed a monopoly in the coal mining sector for so long. But monopoly doesn’t last forever. If our business is doing well because we are a monopoly and there’s no one to compete with, then that’s not good. Customer is the king now,” said the minister.

“We have coal, we have manpower, and yet we import coal. Then there is definitely some problem and we should think about it. That is why improving efficiency, quality is of prime importance,” Joshi added.

Mission Coking Coal

Coal India is adopting ‘Mission Coking Coal’ to raise domestic production and fulfill as much coking coal requirement of the economy as possible.

“With the steel sector poised to grow from 130 million tons (mt) to 300 mt by 2030, coking coal demand is going to shoot up and this will raise our import bill,” coal secretary Anil Jain said.

Soft intervention

As there is a limit to the increase in efficiency that can accrue through improvement in mining processes, Coal India is going to achieve it through ‘soft interventions’ like First Mile Connectivity and implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning.

Such steps along with policy interventions by the government like connecting consumers to closest mines would cut logistics costs and improve productivity, the coal secretary said.