KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – India’s second-largest coal miner, Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL), is planning to start work on six mines before the end of March.
Besides ramping up production capacity, opening four underground and two opencast projects will enable SCCL to bridge the productivity shortfall of its existing opencast and underground mines, company officials have said.
These new projects are part of SCCL’s long-term strategic plan to open 20 new opencast and 11 underground mines and ratchet up production capacity to 90-million tons a year by 2021, up from 53-million tons a year at present.
The miner currently operates 49 mines, of which 15 are opencast and the rest underground.
The strategic plan, by 2021, is to open new mines, including new underground mines, and to convert some underground mines to opencast ones to enable higher production volumes, which should assist in bridging the productivity gap between the miner’s opencast and underground mines.
It is pointed out that despite fewer opencast mines, the latter contributes 82% of current production and employs 18% of the workforce, while underground mines account for 17% production and employ 61% of the total workforce.
The officials concede that as a government-owned and -operated mining company, SCCL has a social obligation to be an employment generator and that the retrenchment of workers to achieve higher productivity levels is not an option.
Hence, instead of phasing out existing underground mines, SCCL will adopt the combination of opening newer underground mines that incorporate the latest longwall mining technology, and convert existing underground mines to opencast and new opencast mines.
The new opencast mines with higher productivity levels should bring up the overall average productivity that is impaired by older mining operations.