CIL to scale up underground mining ops

State-owned Coal India (CIL), the country’s largest coal miner, is looking to scale up its total underground mining production to 66 million tonnes from 45 million tonnes by 2011-12.

Speaking on the sidelines of the 51st Holland Memorial Lecture, N C Jha, director (technical), CIL said, "Underground mining has not been getting due attention, but it's time that it picks up pace since post 2024-25, there would be a drop in open cast mining because of increasing cost and high stripping ratio."

CIL has made a comprehensive action plan to be implemented in all its mines, which would help to scale up the underground mining production, he added.

Jha also pointed out that although 85 per cent of the country's total coal production came from open cast mining, the cost of which would become.

The stripping ratio, which is related to the amount of extra burden to be removed for producing one tonne of coal from open cast mining, would also increase. It is now on an average of 2:1. Thus UG mining would have to be adopted, he said.

Currently, only 15 per cent of the country's total coal production comes from underground mining due to lack of technology and high costs.