By IANS
Kolkata : The Coal India Ltd, the single largest hard coal producing company in the world, has signed an integrity pact with its bidders to bring transparency in transactions between the company and its vendors.
“The integrity pact is a tool developed by Transparency International. The idea of signing the pact is to ensure that all procurement activities between a government body and its suppliers are handled in a fair and transparent manner. I hope it will bring in total transparency in our contracting practices,” Coal India chairman Partha S. Bhattacharyya said at the Coal India vendor’s meet here Saturday.
He said the Coal India is also planning to appoint independent external monitors for tender evaluation from October this year. The Coal India has already proposed for a set of monitors, about 13, to the coal ministry.
In case of any dispute, the independent external monitor can call for any file from the management to take a view on both sides. It could also advice the management, Bhattacharyya said.
He said the Coal India signed the pact after the Oil and Natural Gas Corp signed the same pact in 2005 to bring down corruption in the organisation.
“To provide safety measures to the Coal India employees, we are also developing some projects. The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and the Jadavpur University, Kolkata, have been entrusted with some modernisation programmes,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the event.
The Coal India has seven wholly-owned coal producing subsidiary companies operating in 79 areas and 465 mines, of which 284 are underground, 144 opencast and 37 mixed mines.
The Coal India has also set a target to produce 520 million tonnes of coal by the end of the Eleventh Five Year plan, which calls for an additional production of 159 million tonnes with an annualised growth rate of 9.7 percent.
The company also envisages taking up 119 new projects with an ultimate capacity of 283 million tonnes during the current plan period.
“We are now focusing on underground mining, which is almost untapped, rather than opencast. We are also taking help from various agencies in terms of advanced technology transfer,” Bhattacharyya said.