Green hurdles: Coal India misses target

State-run mining giant Coal India missed its production target, producing just 431.325 million tonnes of coal in the just concluded fiscal, against the lower, recently revised target of 440.20 MT due to green hurdles, a top official said.

State-run mining giant Coal India missed its production target, producing just 431.325 million tonnes of coal in the just concluded fiscal, against the lower, recently revised target of 440.20 MT due to green hurdles, a top official said.

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Coal India Ltd (CIL), the world’s largest coal miner, had a production target of 460.5 MT for 2010-11, which was revised to 440.2 MT, barely a few days before the close of the fiscal.

“CIL could produce only 431.325 MT during the last fiscal as environmental clearances could not be obtained for its capacity expansion projects,” a top company official said.

The production target could have been met from expansion projects but despite the company’s best efforts, it could not obtain clearances for the same from ministry of forest and environment (MoEF), said the official on condition of anonymity.

As many as 154 projects of the Navratna firm, spread across over 26,000 hectares of land and with a potential output of about 210 million tonnes, are awaiting environmental clearances at the Centre and state levels.

The coal ministry in December last year had expressed concerns that delays in the grant of environment clearance to the miner were likely to result in a production loss of about 190 million tonnes, valued at about R18,800 crore, by March 2012.