PM meeting on coal shortages deferred

A high-level meeting called today by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on coal shortages taking a toll on critical infrastructure projects has been deferred.

“The meeting has been postponed to a further date,” said a senior official from the coal ministry, without elaborating on the reasons for the delay.

The meeting was to be attended by power minister Sushilkumar Shinde, coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal and finance minister Pranab Mukherjee along with Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission.

The review meeting was to focus on the progress made in the two sectors in the current Plan period so far and set the course-correction agenda for this year, according to sources.

This comes at the backdrop of environment minister Jairam Ramesh calling the 12th Plan’s one lakh Mw power capacity target “ecologically unsustainable” during the full planning commission meeting in April.

Streamlining the process for granting environment clearances for new projects to take off and fixing a time limit of 150 days for such approvals were expected to be the other items on the agenda for the meeting.

In coal, production during the five year period beginning April 2007 was originally expected to grow by 9.5 per cent to reach 680 MT by March 2012. The Mid-Term Appraisal brought it down to 629 MT falling short of the demand by 83 MT to be met through imports. The latest analysis shows that imports could go up to as high as 142 MT.

In power, the original capacity addition target of 78,700 Mw for the current Plan period has already been revised downwards by the government to 62,000 Mw. Official sources confirm that the actual addition in power capacity in the entire period is not likely to exceed 50,000 Mw.

The coal shortage has already led the power ministry and the domestic power industry to demand a temporary stoppage of e-auction sales of coal to meet the demand of stranded power projects. With Jaiswal having opposed the idea, the matter is likely to come up for discussion in the meeting with the PM.