Coal India to invest Rs 57,000 crore in 5 years to boost output

New Delhi: State miner Coal India Ltd. (CIL) has planned a capital investment of Rs.57,000 crore over the next five years to increase production to 908.1 million tons (MT), as part of the company`s target of producing one billion tons of coal by 2020, parliament was informed on Thursday.

"Coal India has assessed a tentative capital investment of Rs.57,000 crore for the next five years to ramp up its coal production to 908.1 MT from the production level of 494.80 MT in 2014-15", Coal and Power Minister Piyush Goyal told the Lok Sabha in a written reply.

He said CIL`s capital investment projection for 2015-16 is Rs.5,990.5 crore, Rs.8,282 crore for 2016-17, Rs.14,539 crore for 2017-18, Rs.14,635 crore for 2018-19 and Rs.13,529 crore for 2019-20.

In a separate reply, Goyal said that up to December 1 during the current fiscal, 12 projects have been accorded environmental clearance and four projects have been given Stage II Forestry Clearance (FC).

He also told the Lok Sabha that Coal India has planned to set up 15 new washeries.

"Out of these, 9 washeries are planned for non-coking coal with capacity of 94 MT per year and 6 coking coal washeries of capacity 18.60 MT per year," Goyal said.

In yet another reply on CIL, the minister said the company has envisaged investment of Rs.8,615.69 crore in the three major railway infrastructure projects - Tori-Shibpur in CCL (Jharkhand), Jharsuguda-Barapalli in MCL (Odisha) and East and East-West corridor in SECL (Chhattisgarh) for coal evacuation.