Dhanbad, June 7: The Central Mining Research Institute (CMRI) and Central Fuel Research Institute (CFRI) will be merged in an attempt to increase the efficiency of the two premier organisations.

The Prime Minister?s Office has cleared the much-anticipated merger of the Dhanbad-based research centres. The new entity will be known as Central Institute of Mining and Fuel Research (CIMFR). The letter notifying the merger, signed by the director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), reached the two organisations late yesterday evening.

The new organisation will be headed by the director of National Metallurgical Limited, Jamshedpur, S.P. Mehrotra, who has been appointed chief coordinator. CMRI?s current director, Amalendu Sinha, will be the special duty officer of the merged entity.

At present, CMRI has a staff strength of about 350 whereas CFRI has around 550 employees. Once the merger comes through, all research work in the field of mining and fuel consumption besides empirical studies in different projects will be carried out under the head of CIMFR, sources said.

Highly placed sources at CMRI said a coordination committee comprising senior officials of the Union ministry of science and technology, besides officials of CSIR, was formed last year to look into the feasibility of the merger. The panel held several rounds of parleys and high-level meetings with officials of CMRI and CFRI at Dhanbad, Digwadih (Dhanbad office of CFRI) and at New Delhi before agreeing to the merger, which was being opposed by several officials and scientists of CFRI.

The sources said the merger was to have been finalised last year but was delayed because of a lack of consensus on the appointment of a permanent director for the new organisation, a debate on the future of employees after the unification and the fate of the immovable property of CFRI at Raniganj (Bengal), Bilaspur, Nagpur and Ranchi.

CMRI?s Sinha welcomed the move and said it would help scientists in their field of research and empirical work.

But Sinha?s counterparts in CFRI don?t share his views. Partho Sen Gupta described the decision as ?whimsical?.