To facilitate the induction of modern mining technology and equipment, India’s Coal Ministry was looking at merging underground mines in same geographies and move away from a trend of converting underground mines to opencast ones.
An official in Coal India Limited’s (CIL’s) technical consultancy arm, Central Mine Planning and Design Institute Limited, said that one of the biggest impediment to modernising underground mines was that the country did not have large areas of contiguous underground coal deposits, which made it difficult to deploy longwall mining technology.
