A lack of railway coaches in east India's Orissa state has led to a reduced supply of imported coal for power and steel companies including plants of state-run NTPC, an official in a large trading firm said on Friday. A stock of about 2 million tonnes of imported coal has piled up at Paradip port and several more vessels are waiting to off load stocks, a source in the port said.
"At Paradip there is an over piling of stocks that we can't evacuate," the official said. "This has been building up for the last two months as the Railways is not sending enough rakes (wagons)." The official said that the Railways had cut down the availability of wagon combinations, or rakes, to about one or two in a day, each with the capacity to carry about 37,000 tonnes of coal only.
NTPC's plants Farakka and Kahalgaonin the eastern state of West Bengal and Bihar, have been worst hit, the official added. Coal shortages have curbed India's annual electricity generation growth to 3.43 percent in June, the lowest increase since November.
Of the coal stocks at Paradip, about 900,000 tonnes of non coking coal belongs to state-run trader MMTC Ltd and large amounts of coking coal belongs to steelmakers including Jindal Steel and Power Ltd and Neelachal Ispat Nigam Ltd, a source at Paradip port said.
"I am in touch with the Ministry of Railways and they are trying to help," Biplav Kumar, the chairman of Paradip Port, told Reuters. The official in the trading company said the railways had curtailed their supply of rakes as India's iron ore exports had fallen and it therefore was finding it uneconomical to send empty railway rakes to the port. In 2009/10 ended in March, India imported 68 million tonnes of coal to top its domestic production of 531 million tonnes.
Comments
Comments are closed.