Output Stalled For Seven Days At Coal India Unit After Landslide Kills Four Workers
The stoppage, triggered by the death of workers in a landslide, led to a loss of 210,000 tonnes of daily production.
Protests stalled production for the seventh straight day on Monday at the Talcher, Odisha mine of Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd., which contributes a fourth of Coal India Ltd.’s output, Bloomberg reported.
The stoppage, triggered by the death of workers in a landslide, led to a loss of 210,000 tonnes of daily production, according to a statement by Mahanadi Coalfields cited by Bloomberg on Monday. That has led to an estimated revenue loss of Rs 85.7 crore, it said.
The protest, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, impacted availability of fuel at NTPC Ltd.’s Talcher unit that gets coal from the mine. Talcher has estimated coal reserves of 51.16 billion tonnes.
Four workers were killed in a landslide at the mine on July 23, PTI had reported.
The stalled output is definitely a negative for Coal India as Mahanadi Coalfields is the company’s fairly large subsidiary, Amit Dixit, analyst at Edelweiss Securities, said in a note. That will make the production target of 655 million tonnes for ongoing financial year challenging given the flat growth in the quarter ended June, he said.
Coal India missed production target for the 13th straight year in the year ended March.
Mahanadi Coalfields accounts for 24 percent of Coal India’s production and 23 percent of its offtake, according to the miner’s annual report for 2018-19.
JM Financial, however, is not too concerned. Such incidents were frequent at the Talcher coalfield and the impact was limited until now, it said.