Coal India ups production; stocks in power plants to ease by January

The Central Electricity Authority guidelines state that power plants need to maintain 22 days of coal stock

Availability of coal stocks with the country's thermal power plants is expected to normalise to a large extent by mid-January as state-owned Coal India Ltd (CIL) has been able to step up production and debottleneck its supply network to a large extent after freeing up the railway rakes.

Senior company officials told Business Standard that while previously the company's average daily production stood at 1.4 million tonnes (mt) a day, they were able to scale it up to 1.8 mt a day and in the next few days, daily production would touch 2 mt a day.

"However, the target is