The much-awaited fuel supply arrangement for power plants is likely to be in place in the next two weeks, Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia has said.
Addressing The Economist magazine’s India Summit here on Wednesday, Ahluwalia said, “My expectation is that within two weeks we will essentially have a situation where we would be able to say that all power projects which are going to be completed by March 2015, will have fuel supply agreements.”
Early this month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh while addressing the annual meeting of industry chamber Confederation of Indian Industry, had said that the problem of fuel supply – both coal and gas – had been posing problems to power projects.
The Ministries are working to resolve these problems in a time-bound manner.
Coal India Ltd (CIL) has so far entered into fuel supply agreement (FSAs) with 60 power plants even as the deadline set by the Prime Minister’s Office for signing of the FSAs expired in January.
A total of 143 FSAs are to be signed by CIL for identified power projects of 60,000 MW capacity, which have been assured of coal supply in the next five years.
CIL’s monopoly
Advocating liberalisation of the coal sector, Ahluwalia called for reconsideration of the Coal Nationalisation Act.
“There is no rationale for keeping the coal sector under regulation. It is cross-sector inconsistency, as the petroleum sector is not regulated,” he said.