India’s coal gasification programme sits at the intersection of ambition and inertia at present. Coal gasification is a thermochemical process that converts coal into synthesis gas, consisting of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can then be used for the generation of electricity, liquid fuels, fertilisers, and industrial chemicals. For a country like India, which imports over 88% of the crude oil it processes and ranks as the world’s third-largest importer of crude, such alternatives are strategically significant. The ongoing crisis in West Asia that has disrupted — endangered — India’s gas and energy supplies underlines the need for the country to bolster its coal gasification capacities. India, incidentally, has the fifth-largest coal reserves in the world, estimated at 401 billion tonnes. The Centre launched the Coal Gasification Mission in 2020, aiming to gasify 100 million tonnes of coal by 2030. But six years on, the commercial output remains tardy. Strikingly, the constraints cannot be attributed to the lack of funding. The government allocated Rs 300 crore to the project in the 2025-26 budget estimates. But, according to official records, much of this fund remains unspent. The reason cited for the underspending is that no progress was made on the projects in the previous fiscal year. The Centre has now raised the budget for the mission by over 1,075% to Rs 3,525 crore in 2026-27. The lack of synergy between allocation and utilisation points to a deeper malaise, not of financial commitment but systemic readiness, rendering the 2030 target increasingly distant.
One of India’s shortcomings is the long gestation periods for critical projects. It took the Union cabinet over two years to approve the equity investments in two joint ventures by Coal India Limited that envisioned 100 MT of coal gasification by the year 2030. The revival of the Talcher Fertilizers Plant, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018, missed the 2023 completion target. Further, there are concerns with the pace of progress of the seven major coal gasification projects greenlit by the Centre two years ago. The bottlenecks are structural. The NITI Aayog, for instance, has flagged the issue of incompatible gasification technology for the high-ash-content coal available in India. There are other stumbling blocks. A firm in Maharashtra recently appealed to the Centre to place coal-based urea projects on equal footing with gas-based plants citing several reasons. These issues must not deflect the government’s pursuit to diversify India’s energy basket.