Coal India output in Jan at 47 MT, misses target

New Delhi: State-owned Coal India (CIL) produced 47.38 million tonnes (MT) of coal in January, missing its target of 49.44 MT. The company achieved an off-take of 44.44 million tonnes during the month as against the target of 47.24 MT, the company said in a filing to BSE. CIL achieved an output of 366.57 MT between April-January, missing the target of 383.88 MT set for the period, it said.[caption id=“attachment_1372197” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Falling output. Reuters[/caption] The company’s offtake in the first 10 months of the current fiscal stood at 385.96 MT against a target of 401.18 MT for the period. The coal PSU had said last month that it may miss the production target of 482 MT for the 2013-14 fiscal by around 5 MT. The country is facing acute fuel shortages. “In the current fiscal there may be a shortfall in production of around 5 million tonnes,” Coal India chairman and managing director S Narsing Rao had said. He said cyclone Phailin as well as law and order problems at its subsidiaries Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd and Central Coalfields Ltd would be among the reasons for the likely shortfall. Coal Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal had earlier asked the state-owned company to ensure that the output target for FY 2014 is met. Mining activities at Talcher Coalfields in Odisha, including coal transportation, came to a halt on 29 November 2013, following violence after a group of labourers protested the arrest of some of their colleagues at Jagannath area in Angul district. The mining activities in around 6 coal blocks (in Talcher Coalfields) of Coal India subsidiary Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd were affected as a result. According to a CIL official, the PSU suffered production loss in October last year due to Cyclone Phailin, which affected the key coal producing states of Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal. CIL, which accounts for over 80 percent of the domestic production, contributed 452.5 MT of coal in 2012-13 as against the target of 464 MT. PTI