Pressured to augment India's persisting coal shortages that fail to supply its power plants, Coal India Ltd. (CIL) has committed to produce some 448 million tonnes of coal for fiscal year 2012.

India has 75 thermal power projects that depend on state-owned CIL for fuel supplies.

India's coal producer suffered a production setback from August to September due to excessive rainfall.

"This year we had much more rainfall compared to the previous year and this increase was from 150 per cent to 300 per cent. So, that had led to drowning of the mines and the off take and both production and off take had come down heavily," CIL Chairman Shri N.C. Jha told The Economic Times.

The weather disturbance also affected future production because overburden removal could not take place at the same time.

"But now things are picking up and we had about 10 million tonnes less production," Mr Jha noted.

India is dependent on coal for power generation. Some 54.7 per cent of its installed power generation capacity is coal-based, as with much of the proposed 100,000 megawatt (MW) addition contained in the 12th Plan period (2012-17). It takes about 5,000 tonnes of coal to generate 1MW of power every day for a year.

CIL has an 82 per cent share of the country's coal production, but has been slow to address the rising demand.

Recently, the Indian Finance Ministry approved CIL to scout and purchase unlisted overseas firms to meet production targets.

The world's largest coal miner, CIL, has $9.1 billion of cash to buy unlisted overseas companies.

Read more:

Coal India Battles Production Deficit, Okayed to Acquire Assets in Overseas Unlisted Firms