(ET)
Coal India (CIL) chairman Pramod Agarwal confirmed that there should be no cause of concern as there was no proposal to give away any coal block of the PSU giant for commercial mining. The Maharatna company has sufficient number of coal blocks with abundant resource capacity to continue as a commercially viable entity even in the competition era, he said.
CIL has 447 coal blocks, mostly explored, under its disposal. In addition to these, 16 more blocks were allocated to CIL — 10 under the Coal Mines (Special Provision) Act and six under Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act — making it the largest holder of coal resource in the country. Combined capacity of these 463 blocks is close to 170 billion tonne (BT). Most of the allocated16 blocks have a minimum 10 million tonne (MTs)/annum production capacity. Their combined peak rated capacity is 264 MT.
