New Delhi: Following directives issued by the Ministry of Power, several state governments are importing coal through their own orders, and some other states have given their indents for the import of coal to Coal India Ltd (CIL).
Informing this in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Coal and Mines Prahlad Joshi said that during the first quarter from April to June this year, the total import of coal for blending purposes by different utilities was 0.55 MT. “So far, five States have also signed an agreement with CIL for import of 0.511 MT. coal for the month of August and September 2022,” he said.
As per the current import policy, coal is kept under Open General License (OGL) and consumers are free to import coal from the source of their choice as per their contractual prices on payment of applicable duty. “Government of India does not interfere in this matter. However, the Ministry of Power advised power plants on April 28 to import coal for blending purposes during 2022-23 to ensure adequate coal stocks before monsoon,” he said.
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It was decided on May 27 that CIL would import coal for blending purposes and supply to TPPs of State Gencos and IPPs. Recently, the Ministry of Power has reviewed the coal stock position of the States and Gencos and found that states have coal stock of more than 50 percent of normative level. “As such, the Ministry of Power has decided on August 1 that from now onwards, States and IPPs and the Ministry of Coal may decide the blending percentage after assessing the availability of domestic coal supplies,” said Joshi.
In another reply, Joshi said that as of now, there is no plan to revise the national coal index which would link prices directly to foreign indices and would also measure the value and volume of all coal transactions. On a question on whether India would have a separate index for coking coal, Joshi said that Indian Coal is largely heterogeneous in nature due to its drift origin and susceptible to quality variation within the same seam.
“For maintaining the quality of coal, steps like adoption of blast-free mining techniques, utilization of mechanical scraping to remove extraneous materials from coal seam, adoption of mechanical coal handling from mines to the loading points in the First Mile Connectivity projects have been taken,” Joshi said. He said that all the consumers of CIL have the option of quality assessment of the supplies through independent third-party sampling agencies.
