New ground

Asansol Jan. 24: Eastern Coalfields (ECL) expects to come out of the Board for Industrial Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in the next five years. It made a profit of more than Rs 30 crore after three decades of losses.

Accumulated losses of Rs 700 crore drove the company to BIFR.

?Now, after taking measures to improve performance in different categories and with co-operation from trade unions and workers, we expect to come out of BIFR,? said CMD A. Kalam. Explaining how ECL has been climbing out of the hole, he said the BIFR has accepted the draft rehabilitation scheme, which has also found favour with unions.

The upturn in the fortunes of the steel industry has fuelled demand for quality coal. ?Initially, there was a trend of importing coal from China and Korea, but the power and steel companies which had been doing so opted for purchases at home after the overseas consignments turned expensive. This is a positive sign for us. We have also decided to increase capacity from 28 million tonnes to 41 million tonnes by 2011-12,? he said.

As part of its short-term revival plans, the company will increase the number of mechanised underground mines from 48 to 200.

Those suffering massive losses and producing less than open-cast mines will be upgraded.

Outsourcing from open-cast mines will play a key role in ECL?s revival. According to Kalam, the 6 per cent share of such mines in the company?s total production will have to go up in future. ?Pockets of illegal mining will be converted into small open-cast pits,? he added.

The company, he said, would make profit of about Rs 200 crore next year from outsourcing in small open-cast patches. The money will be spent on modernisation of old mines. ?But that does not mean that we are going to privatise the mines or to reduce their strength. The trade unions will have to understand this,? Kalam added.

Of the Rs 2,900 crore required for revival of ECL, Rs 1700-1800 crore will come from outsourcing and the rest from Rajmahal open-cast mines in Jharkhand. The company has taken up a Rs 800-crore project to expand these mines and increase their capacity to 70 million tonnes.

Rehabilitation, stabilisation and shifting will go hand in hand with the revival effort. Kalam said 92 sites have been identified for rehabilitation at an estimated cost of Rs 131 crore. Another 43 have marked out for stabilisation in an effort that will require Rs 411 crore.

?The Centre has sanctioned Rs 1800 crore for implementing the master plan of the project,? Kalam said.