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| Edited By: Sumit Moitra |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 18, 2018, 04:22 AM IST
Coal India is now back on the e-auction route. After staying away for a month following the government’s push to divert supplies to fuel-starved power plants, the public sector miner resumed auctioning on Tuesday.
According to Coal India officials, North Eastern Coalfields, the Assam-based subsidiary of Coal India, went for the e-auction for 20,000 tonnes of coal — 10,000 tonnes each from its Tilak and Ledo open cast mines — at a booking price of Rs4,535 a tonne.
Other subsidiaries like South Eastern Coalfields, Eastern Coalfields and Western Coalfields will follow suit, according to the schedule drawn up by the Kolkata-headquartered holding company.
The revival of e-auction came on a day when the government reportedly pledged to supply adequate fuel to the power sector, which continues to reel under a severe coal shortage.
According to the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), 33 power plants with 39,054 mw of generation capacity had coal stocks for less than four days as on Friday.
But things have improved a bit as efforts are underway to provide more coal-laden rakes to them.
The coal ministry had earlier directed Coal India to offer 4 million tonnes of coal earmarked for e-auction to tide over the coal shortage. That led to the cancellation of all planned e-auction scheduled for October. There is a catch here. Keeping uninterrupted fuel supplies to power plants doesn’t exactly augur well for Coal India’s bottomline, which partly explains its fondness for e-auction.
JP Morgan, in its latest report, has estimated that coal sales through e-auction contribute 26% of Ebitda based on Q1 figures even as it accounts for 11-12% of volumes.
Coal India has already scheduled for 9,23,370 tonne of e-auction of coal, including what was put up for sale on Tuesday.
Apart from North Eastern Coalfields’ 20,000 tonnes auctioned on Monday, South Eastern Coalfields would be conducting its scheduled auctions on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by Eastern Coalfields on Friday and Western Coalfields on Saturday.
