Opening of Technical Bids for Auction of Coal Mines Under Commercial Mining

The auction process of 141 coal/lignite mines for sale of coal was launched by the Nominated Authority, Ministry of Coal on November 03, 2022. The last date of submission of Technical Bid for all the coal was January 30, 2023. As part of the auction process, Technical Bids comprising of online and offline bid documents were opened here today (January 31, 2023) in the presence of the bidders.

The online bids were decrypted and opened electronically in the presence of the bidders. Subsequently, sealed envelopes containing offline bid documents were also opened in the presence of bidders. Entire process was displayed on screen for the bidders.

A total of 96 bids were received under two tranches of commercial coal mine auctions. This is the highest ever bids received since the launch of commercial coal mines’ auction launch by the  Prime Minister in June 2020. This note-worthy interest from the bidders has showed that reform process initiated by the Ministry is very popular with the stakeholders.

Under sixth tranche of auctions, a total of 86 bids both online and offline were received against 32 coal mines and three  bids were received only offline but not online, and two or more bids have been received for 25 coal mines i.e. 79 bids (both online and offline) against 25 coal mines and 7 coal mines have received single bids (both online and offline). Of these 32 coal mines, 10 coal mines are partially explored whereas 22 are fully explored. The cumulative PRC of the fully explored coal mines is 85.62 MTPA and 31 coal mines are non-coking coal mines whereas one is coking coal mine.

Under 2^nd attempt of fifth tranche, a total of 8 coal mines were put up for auction and 10 bids have been received against four coal mines where two or more bids have been received for two coal mines and single bids have been received for two coal mines. All these four coal mines are fully explored coal mines and 2 coal mines are coking coal mines and 2 are non-coking coal mines. The PRC of these 4 coal mines is 4.34 MTPA.

It is also pertinent to note that a total of six public sector companies had submitted the bids in the ongoing round of commercial coal mines’ auction as well. Mine-wise list of bids received is appended below:

A total of 59 companies have submitted their bids (both online and offline) in the auction process as per the following list:

The bids will be evaluated by a multi-disciplinary Technical Evaluation Committee and Technically Qualified Bidders would be shortlisted for participation in the electronic auction, to be conducted on MSTC portal.