Partha S Bhattacharyya, Chairman, Coal India, says the company has things to learn on international experience. Excerpts:
Where do you see the positioning of coal in India? Within that, how significantly will Coal India grow?
Coal India cannot meet the supply-demand gap, because a huge number of blocks have been put in the captive list. 203 blocks with reserves of 48 billion tonnes have been allotted outside Coal India. Basically, the selection criteria was, whatever blocks were not in a position to work beyond 2011-2012 will be put on the captive list.
Whatever blocks we still have are aiming somewhere around 8 per cent in 2010-2011, or may be a little more. Our target for 2011-2012 is to reach 520 million tonnes. But quite a few projects have suffered delays on account of environment and forest clearances. We have identified 15 such, which were considered to contribute something like 79 million tonnes. But the effort will be to achieve a growth rate of 8 per cent.
Can you share with us any plans of acquiring assets globally?
We have floated expressions of interest for strategic partnerships in four countries. Australia is one of those countries; Indonesia, the US and South Africa are the others. We don’t have too much of an international experience. As we go forward, we clearly see that it will be required.
So, we thought it will be appropriate if we found out some like-minded large coal mining companies operating in more than one country and which would be better equipped to work with international players. With this in mind, we have floated a global expression of interest recently.
VERBATIM
The next two months will be a difficult period ... Inventories are coming down. As soon as the season starts, which is going to be sometime in the middle of October, sugar will be in the market. We don't see a price rise after October. Till then, there will be definitely (a rise). The global sugar market is at a 28-year-high.
