The hard truth of a brewing coal crisis

For a government that vowed to break down silos, this is the test of cooperative federalism that it claimed to reinstate

One of the major promises of the Bharatiya Janata Party government when it came to power in 2014 was to be ‘coal surplus’ by increasing production and improving supply. State-owned monopoly Coal India was given a tall target of 1 billion tonnes of coal production by 2019; three arterial railway lines were started from Odisha, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh; and a plan was drafted to increase the number of railway rakes for coal supply to power units.

CIL ramped up production by opening new mines. So much so that one of its subsidiaries CCL was opening a new mine every month last