CIL misses offtake target on muted demand from power plants

Coal India Ltd has fallen short of its offtake target for 2016-17 by 71.3 million tonne as on March 22 due to muted demand from power plants, Parliament has been informed.
For financial year 2016-17, CIL's offtake target was 598.61 MT, Minister of Coal, Power, Renewable Energy and Mines, Piyush Goyal said in a written reply to Rajya Sabha on April 3.
"The offtake performance of CIL in the current year (up to 22.3.2017) has been 527.31 MT (provisional)," he added while replying to a query on whether CIL was struggling to sell all the coal it produced.
Elaborating the reasons for the shortfall, Goyal said: "As power plants had coal stock of 38.875 MT at the beginning of the year 2016-17, they regulated coal lifting and preferred to consume coal from their own stocks for power generation."

Goyal further said that heavy rains in coalfields in August and September last year along with some local law and order issues in certain pockets had also impacted coal transportation and offtake.
Replying a separate query, the minister said that during the the April-January period of 2016-17, CIL's despatch of coal and coal products to power sector was at 344.53 MT (provisional) as compared to 338.19 MT achieved in the corresponding period of 2015-16, a growth of 1.9 per cent.
The minister said a series of measures have been taken by CIL to make more coal available for power sector such as offer coal under special forward e-auction scheme exclusively for the sector.

Besides, measures like reduced reserve price and earnest money deposit to make e-auctions attractive, no performance incentives on higher grades of coal, have also been taken up, he added.