The Planning Commission has asked the Coal Ministry to chalk out an action plan to ensure that CIL meets its production target of 452 million tonnes of coal this fiscal.
“Negative growth of Coal India Ltd (CIL) is a matter of grave concern. It is requested a quick review may be undertaken at the Ministry level and a plan of action worked out to realise the overall production target in the remaining period of the year,” the Planning Commission said in a letter to the Coal Ministry.
CIL accounts for 80 per cent of the domestic coal output in the country. It registered about 2.6 per cent decline in production to 152.4 million tonnes (MT) in April-August 2011 over the corresponding period previous fiscal. It had produced 156.6 MT of coal in the first five months of the last fiscal.
The letter further said, “We are aware of the difficulties in enhancing the production level due to environmental concerns but with relaxing of CEPI norms imposed earlier, CIL should be able to increase its production level.”
Coal Minister Mr Sriprakash Jaiswal had said earlier that CIL could not achieve its 440 MT production target last fiscal mainly due to the Environment Ministry not allowing the expansion of projects falling in areas categorised as critically polluted under CEPI.
CIL had recorded 431 MT output in 2010-11.
“The major cause of missing the target - is the moratorium imposed by Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF) for taking new expansion projects in areas having CEPI above 70, which included 7 major coalfield of CIL,” he had said.
CEPI, which captures the various health dimensions of the environment and acts as a warning tool to facilitate early intervention was lifted from five of the seven coalfields over the last few months.
In 2009, MoEF had introduced CEPI to categorise the environmental quality at given locations and conducted a nation-wide assessment of industrial clusters.