Coal India to undertake 'challenge' of 700 mn tonne output target for FY'20; to look at changing safety policy

Kolkata: Coal India Ltd (CIL) has set a “difficult” production target of 700 million tonne for fiscal 2019-20, a “challenge” the mining major was ready to undertake in the wake of rising power demand, its Chairman A K Jha said. The Kolkata-headquartered company had envisaged an output of 630 million tonne for the current fiscal, but later revised it to 652 million tonne as an aspirational target. “Our aspirational production target for the fiscal is an 85-million tonne jump from what we have been able to produce in the last fiscal. We registered an increase in production of 104 million tonne in the last four years - between 2015 and 2018,” Jha said at a conference of Mining Geological & Metallurgical Institute of India here on Saturday. [caption id=“attachment_4191453” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. Reuters[/caption] CIL achieved an output of 567.4 million tonne in 2017-18, 32.6 million tonne short of its target. “Producing 700 million tonne would be difficult, but CIL was ready to take on the challenge in the wake of the country’s increasing power demand,” he said. The miner’s production grew at 12 percent in the first five months of this fiscal compared to the corresponding period a year ago, but dipped in August to 3.2 percent. “Producing more means that we will have to go deeper into the mines. Mines’ stability and safety in an issue and for that we will need to change our safety policy,” Director General of Mines Safety, P K Sarkar, said. “We are open to all constructive criticism and suggestions to ensure safety of our miners, while we dig deep to increase our production,” he added.