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Rubbishing the Greenpeace report on "fast depleting reserves" of Coal India (CIL) and alleged overstatement of its extractable reserves, CIL chairman S Narsing Rao today said the report was a "sinister design" to malign the state-owned miner.
"This is nothing, but rubbish. So far, extractable reserves as on April 2010 is concerned, government decided to migrate from one scale to another scale. I don't know why they are misrepresenting this fact. There are many reasons to believe that it is part of the sinister design on their part," Rao told reporters here.
The figure in question is the extractable reserves of CIL as on April 2010. As per the Indian standard procedures code (ISP) the reserves were 21.7 billion tonne. However, the government decided to shift to the United Nations framework classification (UNFC), according to which the extractable reserves at that point of time was 18.2 billion tonnes.
According to Greenpeace, CIL should have informed this to bourses. In fact, Greenpeace India has filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) against CIL for concealing material evidence on the scale of their coal reserves, in contravention of the terms of the Listing Agreement under the Indian Securities Contracts Regulations Act, 1956.
However, responding to this, Rao said, "We do not think this is important enough to report. There has been an addition to extractable reserves since 2010, that too we have not reported. If someone is unhappy over this, so be it. We are not answerable to each and everyone."
Also, Greenpeace in its report said, CIL government targets eight% growth rate in production from 2012. If this rate were to be applied to CIL’s reserves, the company would exhaust extractable coal supplies by 2030. If CIL maintains a more realistic five% growth rate, the reserves would be exhausted by 2034.
However, Rao contested this saying, "This is baseless. There has been addition to extractable reserves each year since 2010. the addition is about 2.22 billion tonnes per year in the last three years."
