As much as 70% of Coal India's 49 million tonne of coal stock is unusable because it cannot be evacuated and supplied to power plants when required. That means a dramatic drop in the company's accessible stock to just 16 million tonne.

Despite its best efforts, CIL managed to reduce stock by just 9 million tonne in 2013-14.

Over the past several years, the company has been maintaining a huge stock on its books but most of this has turned out to be of little use.

Mr S Narsingh Rao chairman of CIL said that "Some 33 million tonne of stock is lying in locations where transportation is an issue. The coal from these regions cannot be evacuated at short notice mainly due to issues with the railways. For example , 8-9 million stocks have been lying in the Rasundhara mines but the Hinh Court in Orissa has ruled that loading has been barred during the day."

A senior CIL official said that "As coal remains dumped on ground, it either gets pilfered or gets mixed with ground soil rendering a large part of it unusable. CIL has not done a fresh assessment of this dumped coal over the years, neither has it written off the unusable coal from its books."

Despite having missed its production target by some 20 million tonne, CIL could not evacuate more than 9 million tonne from its stock of a total 57.8 million tonne mainly due to transport availability issues. In most of the cases, the coal is lying in areas where railways cannot send adequate rakes for this coal to be moved.
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In fact CIL had offered its customers the option of picking up coal from the stockyards but that met with little success because of the inaccessibility of the locations. The scheme was offered in 2012 and is still valid but only a handful of companies have participated.

Source:- coal.steelguru.com