State-owned aluminium maker National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO) has been hauled up for its underperformance and expensive delay in developing coal mines allotted to it by the government auditor. <\/p>\n
The CAG, in a report tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, estimates Nalco wasted an opportunity to earn Rs 1,086.63 crore from 2012 2013 to 2016-2017 because of inadequate power leading to underutilisation of its smelter. <\/p>\n
Those four years aluminium production saw a shortfall of 4.93 lakh tonnes. Nalco also incurred an additional expenditure of Rs 326.62 crore on excess consumption of coal in its Captive Power Plant due to higher than norms, station heat rate (the amount of fuel required to generate one unit of electricity). Its failure to detecting slippage of the quality of coal, cost it another Rs 239.23 crore, according to the performance and productivity audit report. <\/p>\n
Nalco had been allotted Utkal D coal block and re-allotted the Utkal E block in September 2015. <\/p>\n
The CAG found fault with Nalco\u2019s refinery and mining operations too. Against a target of 107.35 lakh tonnes, Nalco had produced 96.31 lakh tonnes of alumina hydrate, primarily due to lower production of bauxite in the mines. The failure to maintain the required stock level of bauxite and the quality of feed, resulted in greater consumption of both bauxite and caustic soda. Despite, fixing annual production targets at less than installed capacity, because the high silica in its ore, it still failed to meet its own quantity and quality targets. <\/p>\n
The higher silica content in Nalco\u2019s feed cost it an excess of 1.46 lakh tonne of caustic soda, or Rs 426.27 crore, between FY 2013 \u2013 FY 2016, said the report. It noted Nalco was aware of the technological upgradation it needed, that would save it Rs 75.45 crore annually, but took 57 months to order mud handling equipment.<\/p>\n
Of equal concern is Nalco\u2019s environmental violations flagged by the government auditor. The PSU, it pointed out had committed to using a conveyor for transporting ore from its South Block mine, but had been transporting ore to crushers in Central and North Block Mines in dumpers instead. Nalco had argued that this had been condoned by Indian Bureau of Mines. The CAG dismissed this defence stating the IBM had no authority to waive off condition in the EC granted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change or the consent to operate (CTO) from the Odisha State Pollution Control Board. <\/p>\n
“The discharge of Red Mud and Red Mud Pond Effluent at the Alumina Refinery were consistently higher than the corresponding limits specified by the OSPCB during the period 2012-13 to 2016-2017,” said the CAG report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
State-owned aluminium maker National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO) has been hauled up for its underperformance and expensive delay in developing coal mines allotted to it by the government auditor. The CAG, in a report tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, estimates Nalco wasted an opportunity to earn Rs 1,086.63 crore from 2012 2013 to 2016-2017 because of inadequate power leading to underutilisation of its smelter. Those four years aluminium production saw a shortfall of 4.93 lakh tonnes. Nalco also incurred an additional expenditure of Rs 326.62 crore on excess consumption of coal in its Captive Power Plant due to higher than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}