Last month, Union coal minister Piyush Goyal publicly stated that India does not have a shortage of coal. However, recent coal import figures tell a different story. Despite sitting on 300 billion tonnes of coal reserves, India has been perennially short of coal.

After the opening up of the power sector in 2004, demand for coal suddenly shot up. Import of 21.7 million tonnes in 2006 grew to 131.3 million tonnes in 2014. Perhaps the only period when there was some level of comfort was between 2014 and 2015 when there was an unprecedented incremental growth of 32 million tonnes in coal production.

Consequently, thermal power plants had an average inventory of coal for more than 20 days. Import of coal came down substantially during 2015-16, resulting in a foreign exchange saving of more than Rs 24,000 crore.

Coal production had increased to unprecedented levels because there was an attempt to find the cause of poor coal production. Among other factors, those relating to land acquisition, environment and forest clearances, and shortage of railway rakes to transport coal were found to be critical.

Even though land acquisition for coal mining was governed by the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957, the legislation for land acquisition had brought this process to a grinding halt in most sectors. State governments with the authority to acquire land were, at best, indifferent. Environment and forest clearance was extremely cumbersome, involving numerous layers of bureaucracy.

Most coal lies in inaccessible areas of the country. Hence, transporting it to the location of its use posed additional challenges. Though trains are the most economical way of transporting coal, a large number of mines are not connected to a rail network. Additionally, there was shortage of rakes on account of competing demand from sectors like food and steel.

Anumber of steps were taken to take care of these problems. At the outset, planning for ramping up coal production was undertaken in consultation with stakeholders that included those involved in mining of coal at the ground level. The states, too, were involved as a value proposition.

Excavation of coal resulted in an enormous amount of revenue, and direct and indirect employment opportunities in the states. Meetings with state governments were not held in Delhi. Instead, team of officers from Delhi went down to each state to discuss with senior state officers.

Technology was used extensively to monitor various clearances. A web-based portal, based on the successful Project Monitoring Group’s (PMG), was put in place that was updated real-time. An institutional arrangement was made to meet critical ministries of the railways and the environment and forest every month.

These steps led to land acquisition soaring to 5,500 hectares in 2014-15, and environment and forest clearance reached 3,400 hectares. All this, in turn, helped increase coal production dramatically. So then, why didn’t production grow at the same rate in the years after 2015-16?

One of the biggest contributors to the increase was Coal India Limited chairman-managing director Sutirtha Bhattacharya during 2014-16 who built up a motivated team. However, after his departure, this public sector utility was left virtually headless — rather, with heads changing every few months. Now that Coal India has a chairman with longer tenure, signs of improvement are already visible.

What is NITI Aayog’s prescription? In June 2017, it had floated a paper that recommended the splitting up of Coal India subsidiaries into independent companies. It isn’t clear how such a splitting will lead to an increase in coal production. Now, NITI Aayog is planning to come up with a policy to increase production. Here again, it isn’t clear how a policy would help when the issues that beset the sector are more operational in nature.

GoI has already taken a commendable policy decision to allow commercial mining. The key factor now is to implement this, and not scout for another one.

The factors that limit coal production, as earlier mentioned, are land acquisition, various clearances and evacuation of coal. None of these requires a policy intervention. It requires action on the ground. Can NITI Aayog make things happen on the ground? Should NITI Aayog be entrusted with this task?

The last time coal production was tackled, it was not on account of what NITI Aayog did, but because the ministry understood the nature of the problem, went down to the states to resolve issues, conveyed value proposition to the states and other stakeholders, and played the role of facilitator in helping Coal India achieve record production. It has been done in the past. So, it can be done again.