Dhanbad: Coal secretary Amrit Lal Meena on Saturday visited the Ena fire project of Kusunda area of Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), a Coal India Limited (CIL) subsidiary, in Dhanbad and reviewed the progress of the Jharia master plan (JMP) with the concerned officers.
CIL chairman Pramod Agrawal, BCCL chairman and managing director (CMD) Samiran Dutta accompanied Meena during his visit. It was the first visit of Meena to a coal mining area after he took over as the coal secretary on November 1.
Mining areas in Jharia coalfields within the leasehold of BCCL are faced with problems of fire and subsidence due to the century old history of coalmining. These problems have been receiving attention of all concerned from time to time and the corrective measures have been taken on case to case basis at different times.
There are many towns, villages, roads, and railway lines etc, are situated in the Jharia coalfields, which faces the threat of subsidence due to unground fire. In additions, fire is also active in some colliery, causing danger to the surface structure as well as polluted some part of the area and affect environment of the locality.
Meena also visited Moonidih underground mine, WJ area, BCCL and inspected Moonidih washery, subsidence sites at Sendra-Bansjora, fire affected site at Kujama Colliary and JMP rehabilitation site at Belgaria.
The secretary interacted with the project affected people of the area. Besides Agrawal, and the BCCL CMD, the coal secretary was also accompanied by director technical (operation), BCCL, Uday A Kaole and other top officials.
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After inspection and visits to various mines and projects, Meena also held a brief discussion with the BCCL management on the company’s coal production achievements. “Management of BCCL is doing great. The progress is phenomenal. BCCL has plans to excavate Seam 17 in Moonidih soon. Central government, railway and BCCL working together to minimize the time gap between coal extraction and despatch. This will reduce the impact on the environment,” said Meena.
During the visit to BCCL, the coal secretary also held brief review talks with Eastern Coalfields Limited (ECL) CMD AP Panda and other top officials of the management.
