Coal India’s coal despatch under the five e-auction windows at 77.4 million tonnes (MTs) rose 31% during April-December’21 compared to 59 MTs in the corresponding period year ago. The premium over notified price in e-auctions increased almost four-fold to 58% during April-December’21 compared to 15% of the same period last year, a senior executive said.
Special forward e-auction, the exclusive window meant for the power sector, accounted for nearly 28 MTs of the total despatched quantity.
Coal supplied under other e-auction outlets, where predominantly non-regulated sector customers access coal, accounted for 49.5 MTs. Under this category CILlogged a growth of 21% compared to 41 MTs of the same period last year and a two-fold increase over 24.4 MTs of comparable period 2019.
The volume increase in supplies under e-auction was achieved as CIL supplied a record 391 MTs of coal to thermal power plants during April-December’21 clocking 23.3% growth. The increase in absolute terms is 74 MTs. In comparison, despatch to the power sector was 317 MTs for the same period last year.
CIL’s total off-take scaled up to 482 MTs during the first nine months of the fiscal registering a year-on-year growth of 18%. The increase in absolute terms was 72 MTs compared to 410 MTs in April-December’20.
CIL has booked a total of 83.7 MTs of coal under its five e-auction categories during April-December- a 2.3 MTs increase over 81.4 MTs of corresponding period last fiscal.
During the fourth quarter of the current fiscal even if CIL books the same quantity of coal in e-auctions that it did during same quarter previous fiscal, which was 42.6 MTs, the company would still sail past the record high e-auction allocation of 124 MTs achieved in 2020-21.
The despatch to non-power sector during April-December’21 stood at 91.1 MTs which is almost at par with 92.2 MTs of the same period last year. Compared to April-December’19 the growth in supplies to non-regulated sector consumers is 11.5%.
