Indian Railways has canceled 753 passenger trains to make way for coal imports amid power crisis.
India has ramped up production of coal and canceled passenger trains to free up tracks for transport, officials said, as the government scrambles to emerge from its worst power crisis in years.
State-owned Coal India, which accounts for 80 percent of India’s coal production, increased production by 27.2 percent in April, the German coal ministry said on Friday. The federal government-run Indian Railways has grounded 753 passenger trains, the government said.
India has urged its states to increase coal imports over the next three years to build inventories and meet demand, Reuters reported on Wednesday, underlining the seriousness of the crisis.
Coal stocks are at their lowest pre-summer levels in at least nine years, and demand for electricity is expected to rise at its fastest rate in almost four decades.
“The government has decided to … discontinue passenger trains to give priority to the movement of coal rakes [trains] across the country to cope with an unprecedented shortage of vital energy at thermal power plants,” the government said.
It didn’t say how long the train service would be out or how commuters would get by without it.
Coal accounts for nearly 75 percent of India’s electricity generation, and power plants account for more than three-quarters of the more than a billion tons of coal consumed annually.
Indian railways loaded 427 trains with coal on Thursday, the government said. That’s more than the pledge of 415 trains per day on average, but still less than the target of 453 per day.
India’s energy minister said Tuesday at a court-ordered meeting that the railways are delivering an average of 390 trains a day, 14 percent less than demand and 6 percent less than the railways’ own commitments.