Centre fails in attempt to auction Telangana coal blocks, to hand over blocks to SCCL

Centre is finally relenting to the requests of the Telangana State government to hand over four coal blocks to the Singareni Collieries Company Limited

Hyderabad: The Centre is finally relenting to the requests of the Telangana State government to hand over four coal blocks to the Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL), after the Coal Ministry’s attempts to put these blocks on auction for commercial mining fell flat.

The Coal Ministry, which had adamantly refused to heed the State’s requests to hand over the Kalyan Khani Block-6, Koyagudem Block-III, Sathupalli Block-III and Sravanapalli coal blocks to SCCL, is learned to have sent feelers to the Singareni management recently, stating the blocks would be handed over the SCCL.

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The four coal blocks, all located in Telangana, were offered for allocation by way of auction under the provisions of Coal Mine (Special Provisions) Act, 2015 (CMSP Act) and the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 (MMDRA) by the Centre, despite protests from various quarters against the attempts to open up the country’s coal resources to commercial mining.

However, after several rounds of auctioning, except for Sathupalli Block-III, none of the other three coal blocks found takers. Even the Sathupalli block got only one application and since rules do not allow auction for a single entry, that too was cancelled.

Much before this, the Telangana government had requested the Centre to cancel the auction of these four coal blocks and to allocate them to SCCL.

Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao had even wrote directly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in December 2021 urging him to stop the auction of four coal blocks, pointing out that they were crucial to SCCL, which was meeting the coal requirements of thermal power stations in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

However, the Centre had stubbornly gone ahead with the auction process, not once but several times, and still failed to taste success when it came to the four blocks in Telangana.

Singareni Chairman and Managing Director N Sridhar, during a review meeting on Monday, gave enough indication that the four coal blocks would be shortly allocated to the company.

He reportedly told officials that efforts were being made to get the coal blocks. “The Centre is responding positively to our request to hand over the coal blocks to us. This will go a long way in meeting our coal production targets,” he is learned to have told officials.

The SCCL had set a target of mining 75 million tonnes of coal during the 2023-24 fiscal and if the four coal mines were allocated to it, the company could easily achieve the target, a Singareni official told Telangana Today.