State-owned CIL on Wednesday said it has entered into a pact worth Rs 2,900 crore with a Belarus-based mining equipment manufacturer for purchase of dumpers.
The pact is for purchase of 96 dumpers of 240 tonne capacity each, Coal India Ltd (CIL) said in a statement.
‘CIL on Saturday last formally signed a major procurement pact worth Rs 2,900 crore, for purchase of 96 dumpers of 240 tonne capacity each with Belaz, the Belarus-based mining equipment manufacturer,” the PSU said.
In August last year, the CIL board had given its nod for the procurement of these dumpers.
The entire Rs 2,900 crore investment would be funded through CIL’s own finances and includes the cost of equipment along with the spares and consumables for eight years.
For CIL, whose 95 per cent of the entire coal output is through opencast mines, dumpers of such high capacity are pivotal in ferrying Over Burden (OB) from mine working face to dump yard.
OB is the extraneous material that overlays the coal seam, removal of which makes the dry fuel’s production easier.
The batch of 96 dumpers would be deployed in two of the large opencast mines of South Eastern Coalfields Ltd (SECL), the highest coal producing subsidiary of CIL, namely Gevra and Kusmunda.
While 84 machines would be pressed into action in Gevra, the rest 12 would be operationalised in Kusmunda.
The first lot of six dumpers would roll into Gevra open cast (OC) expansion project within eight months from the signing of the contract.
Thereafter on CIL’s go-ahead as per their performance, after one year from the date of their commissioning, the rest 90 would follow at four machines per month.
CIL further said 66 similar capacity machines are already operational in SECL and once the 96 are added to the existing fleet, their total would swell to 162.
CIL’s overburden removal (OBR) performance “has been persistently positive since the beginning of the fiscal and ending January 2021, the growth clocked a robust 20 per cent at 1106 Million Cubic Metres,” it said.
With the company confident of sustaining OBR growth momentum, the role of dumpers in transporting the extracted OB gets amplified further.
This is the second contract that CIL has sealed with Belaz. Earlier it had procured 77 dumpers of 150 tonne capacity from the company through a global bidding.
CIL accounts for over 80 per cent of domestic coal output.
