BCCL indentifies new mines posed for JV with SAIL

Kolkata, Apr 4: Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), wholly owned subsidiary of Coal India Limited has targetted to augment its production to 23 million tonnes of coal during this fiscal and has identified two new patches of open-cast coalmines at Konkona and Pujama to extract at least one million additional tonne of coal by 2008.

BCCL Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) A K Paul said the new patches were likely to have a reserve of nine million tonnes of coking coal and production is expected to start this fiscal.

He said the BCCL had also tied up with Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) for supply of one million tonnes of coal per annum to them to meet their requirements under a joint venture programme.

He said, under the programme, SAIL would invest to the tune of Rs 500 crores during the next two years for the extraction of high quality coal from the Munirdih mines near Raniganj in Burdwan district, where a total of 15 million tonnes of coal is likely to have reserves to meet the requirement of SAIL for next one and a half decade.

''Moreover, we are looking at the oppurtunity of joining hands with a Ukranian Coal mining company for extracting coal to the tune of 0.7 millinon tonnes per year from the Sonardih mines on risk and profit sharing basis with initial investment of 250 crores coming from the company,'' Mr Paul said.

Refering to the financial performance of BCCL, Mr Paul said though they have earned a profit of nearly Rs 203 crores in 2005-06, after suffering a huge loss for more than a decade, their profitability plummeted to barely Rs 21 crores during last year against the target of 227 crores.

Claiming that the closure of a number of non-profitable and exhausted mines as the prime reason for the certain dip into the margin of profit, Mr paul said, however during the current fiscal they have set a new provisional target of Rs 526 crores as profit.

Asked about the rationale behing the optimism, the BCCL CMD said with the increase in productivity coupled with modernisation they were confident of acheiving the target of profit.

This would also go a long way in bringing out the company from the realm of the BIFR within the next three years.

About the investment plan, Mr Paul said of the projected Rs 1350 crore of investment into the company in a span of five years about Rs 500 crores had already been invested under different heads of modernisation and capacity expansion.

To another query, Mr Paul said during the last two years altogether 41 mines had been closed because of their non-viability and were planning to shut down 16 more such mines to rationalise the production.

He also assured that, however, the 35000 odd employees in these mines would not lose their jobs and be deployed in other mines to improve their profitablity.

Regarding the step taken to improve the overall safety measures of BCCL, which had witnessed one of the worst underground coalmine disaster at Bhatdih colliery of Western Jharia last year claiming more than 50 lives, Mr paul said though last year about 150 crores were spent on safety standards, this year Rs 160 crore had been earmarked for the same with all provisions for preventing any major disaster.

UNI