Piyush Goyal: India is a power surplus country, have sufficient coal to ensure we never have a shortage

12 June 2017

Highlighting some challenges in growth in the power sector, the Piyush Goyal said, “We have shortage of coking coal for which we have to depend on imports.

Minister of State for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy and Mines Piyush Goyal on said India is a power surplus country and has sufficient coal in country to ensure ‘we never have a shortage’, ANI reported.

Goyal said the Centre has envisaged growth in the power sector and he is working on a ‘transformative agenda’. “Even after 70 years of Independence there were more than 18,051 villages which did not receive electricity. Modiji had made it his agenda that this will end. Today, there are around 4000 villages left which are still bereft of electricity and this issue will end in the next 6-8 months.”

He said that through the Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY) scheme, discoms will be able to get power at a decent rate. There is enough production of coal in the country today, he added. There is less chances of coal being depleted here, than in other countries. 35 to 40 per cent of the coal we have is fly ash. So if we transport it, half of it does not have any calorific value. So we have problems while transporting coal, he said. He added that we are certainly self-dependent when it comes to coal in domestic use. Highlighting some challenges in growth in the power sector, the minister said, “We have shortage of coking coal for which we have to depend on imports because we have never imagined that we can be coal independent. We have the third largest reserves of coal.”Source – financialexpress