Coal India sets FY’13 production target at 470 million tonnes

Coal India Limited (CIL) has set a production target of 470 million tonnes for the current financial year (2012-13), Zohra Chatterji, CMD of the coal major, said while reviewing the performance of the company for 2011-12.

''CIL is now fully geared to achieve a production target of 470 million tonnes set for the 2012-13 financial year,'' she said, adding, that the company has turned around the crippling negative growth of 19 and 16.9 per cent in August and September 2011 due to unprecedented rains and still ended with a positive growth of 1 per cent during the 2012 fiscal.

CIL ended fiscal 2011-12 with a production of 435.84 million tonnes, more than 4.52 million tonnes compared to previous fiscal, but short of the revised target of 447 million tonnes set for fiscal 2012.

In comparison to the AAP target of 447 million tonnes set in the beginning of the year, the achievement is 96.5 per cent.  The contribution from opencast mines was 91 per cent of total coal production, which has improved to 397.45 million tonnes compared to 391.30 million tonnes in 2010-11.

The company had maintained a cumulative positive growth of 1.4 per cent till July'11. However, excessive rainfall in almost all the coalfields in August and September 2011 had an adverse impact on coal production, and resulted in a catastrophic negative growth of 19 per cent and 16.9 per cent in the month of August and September'11, respectively, she said.

The negative growth trend continued in the month of October'11 also (-8.4 per cent). Due to concerted effort and focused strategy of CIL team, the cumulative negative growth till January'12 (1.6 per cent) was arrested and became positive in the month of Feb'12 with significant production growth of 17 per cent. The company could thus wipe off the negative growth. The effort was sustained in March'12, which led to a production of 54.14 million tonnes against 50.71 million tonnes produced in March'11 thereby recording a growth of 6.8 per cent.