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 Fast-track mine approvals, tighter production oversight and more
flexibility in coal sales have helped power station stocks recover
from a six-year low hit in October, vindicating Modi's pitch to
voters as the state leader who brought round-the-clock power to
industrial Gujarat.
As Modi prepares to mark his first year in office and seeks to
fulfill a poll promise to provide power to all of India's 1.2
billion people by 2019, power stations hold 28 million tonnes of
coal, a 38 percent jump from a year ago, government data shows.
"The situation is improving," said K. Raja Gopal, head of the
thermal power business at construction, power and real estate
conglomerate Lanco Infratech, pointing to recent growth in Coal
India output. "More needs to be done but 8 to 9 percent didn't
happen before."
India, the world's third-largest coal buyer, is expected to cut
imports by a fifth in the fiscal year to March 31 from an estimated
200 million tonnes in the previous year. Power companies have relied
on imports for 15 percent of their coal needs.
India suffered one of its worst blackouts in 2012 due to a shortage
of coal plus outdated transmission lines and an over-burdened grid.
Power shortages shaved 0.4 percent off GDP in 2012/13, industry body
FICCI estimates.
Coal stocks fell to zero at New Delhi's Badarpur power station last
October but now there is enough to last 43 days going into the peak
demand season. The situation is similar at many other power plants
across India, where over 60 percent of electricity is generated by
coal.
State-controlled Coal India also holds pit-head stocks of 53 million
tonnes that can be shipped before the four-month monsoon season
starting in June, a company source said.
The company's output rose 32 million tonnes to 494.2 million tonnes
in 2014/15, the biggest volume rise in its four-decade history,
Chairman Sutirtha Bhattacharya told Reuters. Output is expected to
jump to 550 million tonnes in 2015/16 and 1 billion tonnes by
2019/20.
The revival has been spearheaded by Piyush Goyal, an accountant and
investment banker picked by Modi to run a power and coal
super-ministry with a remit extending from the coal face to
household power supplies.
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OPEN AT LAST
Barely a month into his job, Goyal pushed Coal India to open a
long-ready but remote mine in the first big launch in five years.
Operations at the Amrapali mine in the eastern state of Jharkhand
were delayed for almost a decade by the lack of a railway link to
take coal away.
Now, for the first time in the company's history, Coal India has
allowed power companies to pick up coal directly from the mine by
truck without signing any long-term fuel supply agreement.
Coal India opened three more big mines last fiscal year and expanded
others. The government, meanwhile, set up a website to track mine
progress to keep Coal India's bosses on their toes.
But the company will have to deploy technology to improve abysmal
efficiency, and private companies will have to follow up on the
government's invitation to mine and sell coal, to meet the ambitious
goal of doubling production in five years.
India has launched a round of auctions of mines so that private
firms can extract coal for their own use, after the Supreme Court
last August canceled more than 200 illegal coal block awards made
over two decades.
(Additional reporting by Tommy Wilkes; Editing by Douglas Busvine
and Alan Raybould)
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