Cement Energy and Environment

. _J You are actually going back to licensing systems. If you are talking of reforms, you have to move away from these licensing systems. Union Power and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal has said that India will stop importing thermal coal in three years. I will believe the statement when the industry, Coal India, makes it. I cannot believe a statement if it is made by a minister. Why? Because the minister won't do the mining. The mining will be done by entities who are involved in mining operations. And they are the ones who must come forward and say these are the right policies. The statement will have meaning only if the industries come forward and say, yes with these policies we would be able to ramp up production. Once this e-auction process is over, how long will it practically take for India to use coal mines, coal reserves at the optimum level? That's a very big question because now India is also coming under increasing pressure, on the climate front and reducing coal use rather than expanding it. The point is we have not been able to utilise our coal reserves so far. We say we still have a hundred years of coal reserves, someone will say we have 200 years of coal reserves. The point is, again, the same question, that those reserves are useless until we can mine them, produce them, use them. The window within which we can use them and mine them is getting smaller year by year. The longer we take, the more difficult it will get to justify internationally our burning coal, say, 20 or 30 years from now. Now the point is, when you are setting up a coal power plant today means someone is investing in that, he is investing over a 30-35 year cycle. Both the coal miner and the power plant operator are investing in the future . If coal is only going to be available for the next five years, then there is no point in making that kind of an investment. He is not going to make any money but rather lose money in the short term. So we do not want any stranded assets left there again in the absence of coal. So we need a far more long term vision. How long does it take to get an operation started? In coal mining, the gestation period need not be too long. You can start coal mining after two years. Gestation period here rises majorly because you get into problems of land acquisition, you get problems of environmental clearances, then you get into the problem of whether you have a rail link, how are you going to transfer the coal out and where will you take it. Rail, where are the tracks, where is the infrastructure to evacuate the coal. Many of the coal mines are without evacuation facilities. So all these things only add to the gestation period. So in that case I would presume Adani's idea of importing coal, of getting the mine and now getting the money for the operations from Indian banks, make sense. It does make sense. See, you are not able to produce coal within the country in a short time, and you see a huge demand for coal within the country, so what else do you do? What is the demand-supply gap? Last year we imported 180 million tonnes. We do not know how it shapes up this year. But you know coal imports are stead ily rising because of rising demand and because our coal production has stagnated over the past few years. It is sheer incompetence. Now that e-auction is in place, do you think it is very imperative to have a coal regulatory bill? Provided we understand what regulation means. Unfortunately in this country, the dividing lines between administration, regulation and policy making are not very clear. And that is not a problem in just coal, it is a problem across sectors. It is a problem we're facing in aviation, in telecom , across the whole energy industry. Let us first be very clear in our head as to which direction we are going in this long-term vision of coal and power business. Long term meaning, I'm not even talking of 30-40 years. Let us have a clear vision of what we are doing for the next 10-15 years. In India's energy basket, how important is coal? You cannot survive without coal. Two-th irds of our electricity comes from coal. Coal is the most important in our energy basket. Without coal there is no energy security for India. You can keep 25