Nothing, it seems, is going to prevent a big showdown between Coal India ltd (CIl) and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) over non-payment of dues by the power major to the coal behemoth citing poor quality of dry fuel, as a meeting between heads of the two state-owned entities with Coal Secretary S K Srivastava to resolve the matter, ended in five minutes flat with the warring parties sticking to their guns.
NTPC Chairman Arup Roy choudhury and CIl chief S Narsing Rao were supposed to meet Srivastava at 6 pm on Wednesday, and much was being expected from it as earlier in the day NTPC officials had held a detailed meeting with media persons explaining the problems the power producer was facing owing to poor quality of coal being supplied by CIl and had defended their move to stop payments for the same since October 2012.
The much anticipated meeting however did not even last 10 minutes as both the PSU heads walked out of the Coal Secretary's chamber in Shastri Bhavan belting out their oft-repeated stance.
While Roychoudhury told waiting media persons said that NTPC will continue to pay as per the quality of coal or the calorific value of the fossil fuel received at its utilities, Rao said that CIl can only provide the kind of fuel it mines.
Though none of the officials could be contacted for further details of the meeting and even Srivastava did not respond either to messages or phone calls made by The Pioneer, the fact that both the entities have stuck to their stance, indicates clearly that the stand-off is not going to be resolved any sooner.
In such a scenario, sources close to the development indicated that only an intervention by the Prime Minister's Office could resolve the matter, a point highlighted earlier by this newspaper.
Prior to the meeting, NTPC's Director (Operations) in an interaction with media persons had said that CIl is yet to set up the required infrastructure that can compliment the new pricing mechanism for coal that it had implemented in January 2012 - the gross calorific value (GCV) method.
Owing to this, NTPC has not cleared dues to CIl related to coal supplied to it. Dues close to around Rs 2,000 crore are pending with NTPC, Mishra said, since October 2012. Annually, he said, NTPC purchases around Rs 23,000 crore worth of coal from CIl.
In retaliation, CIl had directed its subsidiary Eastern Coalfields ltd (ECl) to stop supplies to NTPC's plants, and these were only resumed after the Coal Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal intervened. Since then, only around 50 per cent supplies are being given by ECl.
Both NTPC and CIl also differ on sampling of coal, wherein the power generator says that sampling of coal should be done at loading end (that is when coal is being dispatched by CIl) while the miner claims that the buyer should do it at its receiving end.
The proposal of third party sampling of coal (where a neutral body would assess quality of coal supplied by CIl) is being formulated, though it would only come by September this year, and till that time, the logjam is expected to continue unless a compromise is not reached urgently keeping the consumers' interest in mind.