Coal India Limited

Coal India Limited (CIL) is an Indian state-owned coal mining and refinery company headquartered in Kolkata, West Bengal, India and the largest coal-producing company in the world and a Maharatna company. The company contributes to around 82% of the coal production in India.

• The company produces non-coking coal and coking coal of various grades for diverse applications. Most of the coal production is from open cast mines.
• Coal India’s major consumers are power and steel sectors. Others include cement, fertilizer, brick kilns and a host of other industries. The company sells substantially all of the raw coal it produces in the Indian market.

Conclusion

The import dependency for good quality coal is neither good for India’s energy requirement nor for its fiscal health. India still has to import nearly 213 million tons coal to ensure continuous supply. Therefore, government should revisit coal grades pricing mechanism from grades based on coal mined to grades based on coal desired for end use. Also, there is a need for increasing production and competition by leveraging higher producing mines to enable more world-scale operations. The arrival of private players in the coal mining practices can bring a lot of better things into the picture. And various government initiatives and better transparency in the coal blocks allocations can give a push to the coal mining in India.