Coal India officers' 3-day strike to hurt output further

A perfectly timed strike for three days by officers of Coal India starting today followed by Holi revelry would see the public sector miner miss out on five crucial days of operations in the terminal month of the fiscal year at a time when output is already behind the yearly target.

"After three days of strike there is Holi. And its normal for staff to abstain from work on the next day of the festive holiday. So, we foresee operations getting impacted for five continuous days," Saurabh Dubey, senior vice president of Coal Mines officers' Association of India, told dna.

While the striking officers, just about 19,000, don't directly undertake mining activities and form a minority in a 3.5 lakh strong workforce, their absence would be surely felt and would impact mining as these personnels are in charge of explosives and diesels in a mine area, critical components for blasting and running earth-moving vehicles, he said.

"Operations would be definitely affected as only officers can authorise issue and use of explosives needed for blasting in open cast mining. The magazines are kept in their charge. Also, fuels like diesel are issued to the trucks and dumpers only if authorised by an officer-grade staff. So, its wrong to believe that since the workers are not participating in the strike, mining activity wouldn't get hurt," Dubey said.

The officers' body met Coal India chairman Narsing Rao on Tuesday to get an assurance about the demand for which the strike has been called for but the talks failed. And with no subsequent communication on Wednesday, the officers are now going ahead with their three-day strike.

The demands raised by them relates to their wages such as implementation of performance-linked pay and new pension scheme among others.

With an average daily production of 1.2 million tonnes, five days of no-show would led to a loss of about 6 million tonnes, Dubey estimated.

"Supplies would be impacted mostly to those power plants having deficient coal stocks like those in Karnataka," he said.

The loss of output would pinch Coal India hard at a time when the state-run miner's production this fiscal till February stands at 409.13 million tonnes against a target of 429.29 million tonnes set for the 11 months period, lower by 5%.
February output was 42.56 million tonne, much lower than target of 45.41 million tonnes.

Coal India chairman had earlier instructed workers to gird their loin and produce as much coal as possible during March to make up for some of the lost output till now.
But with five days of idleness in the busy season, the public sector coal miner would eventually end up widening the deficit gap.