The Business Bytes
TBB BUREAU
NEW DELHI, PRIL 25, 2022
To ensure swift supply of coal across power plants, additional trains and rakes by Indian Railway have been initiated to augment transportation of coal through its network. Indian Railways has ramped up the coal transportation resulting in 32 per cent more coal freight loading between September 2021 and March 2022. There has also been a 10 per cent increase in freight, by efficiently mobilizing resources after April ‘22.
During the year 2021-22 Indian Railways augmented the transportation of coal through Railways by a record 111 million tonnes and loaded a record 653 million monnes of coal as compared to 542 million tonnes in the previous year i.e. a growth of 20.4 per cent.
Further during the period September 2021 to March 2022 loading of coal to power sector was augmented by 32 per cent in just 2 quarters.
In April 2022, Indian Railways has taken many steps to prioritize the loading of coal to power sector which has led to increase in supply of coal of more than 10 % within one week time.
This improvement has been possible due to various measures undertaken by Indian Railways.
The movement of Coal trains have been prioritized and the each and every train is being intensively monitored during the entire cycle from Loading to movement and finally unloading.
Through this prioritization and monitoring the transit time of coal trains to long distance power has been reduced significantly by 12-36 per cent for critical power plants.
Indian Railway has prioritized the movement of coal to long distance power houses as well which is reflected in the fact that the average lead of coal trains has increased by 7 per cent in the last 5 days as compared to the average leads of 1st to 10th April.
Despite this increase in the average lead of coal trains the time taken between two successive loadings of the same rake for these stocks has reduced by 10 per cent.
With these operational innovations Indian Railways has augmented the supply of coal trains to power houses as well as has loaded more coal rakes on a sustained basis.
