Coal India Limited

The same monsoon was too dry for the dams and too wet for the mines.

Coal India was also digging less coal than it did a year ago.

Between April and August, its production fell 4.5%.

In August alone, it fell 5.7% to 47.5 million tons.

And here's the catch.

It made up for this difference by drawing down on the stockpile that it had built at the mines.

So there was coal at Coal India's mines, about 76 million tons, but it just wasn't getting to the power plants fast enough, which is where September's power crunch gets even more interesting because the real question is: How much slack does India's electricity system actually have when many things go wrong at the same time? On Monday, India's coal minister said that there was no shortage of coal.

The problems caused by the monsoon, he said, had now normalized.

[upbeat music] In today's episode, we'll do one deep dive and cover another story for the day.

First, we'll talk about the Indian states solar is forgetting, and then we'll talk about why power plants run short on coal sometimes.

Welcome back to The Daily Briefing by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets.

I'm your host, Akshara, and today is Tuesday, 29 September.

Chhattisgarh has limestone and iron ore.

But potential and realization are separated by decades of structural neglect, and the barriers run deeper than a lack of political will.

So in 2022, Jharkhand became the first Indian state to constitute a just transition task force.

It was ambitious on paper, but in practice, India Spend reported that the task force had remained largely inert while the state continued opening new coal mines.

Similarly, the northern parts, that is the Joda and, uh, Keonjhar district and the Koida and, uh, Sundargarh district, those two regions are known as the mineral hinterland of Odisha because of the rich iron ore and manganese reserves.

Similarly, as far as coal is concerned, uh, the Sundargarh, Ib Valley, and Talcher region in the central Odisha, that, uh, the one of the major coal reserves in India and, uh, one of Coal India Limited's subsidiary, like the Mahanadi Coalfield, has its operations in those regions.

And, uh, as I said, chromite, that is exclusively to Odisha as number one in, uh, chromite production, the Sukinda area and Jajpur district as coastal, uh, belt, so that has rich chromite belts.

And, uh, so this is what I said, the mineral scenario of Odisha.