Bungling with black gold
When it comes to the lords of Collieries, there is little method in their madness. While coal demand for power projects in the private sector outstrips supply, there is no clear rationale for allocating long-term coal supplies to fuel private sector power plants from the mines of near-monopoly public sector undertaking Coal India Ltd. Recently, for the first time, the coal ministry decided to bring some sanity to this process, by laying down an allocation norm. What followed thereafter was more chaos.