The next bottle of water you buy on a train could have come from a coal mine

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26 Aug, 2025 12:21

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The next bottle of water you buy on a train could have come from a coal mine.

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has joined hands with state-owned coal mining company Coal India for a project to use excess groundwater from mines to manufacture purified packaged drinking water sold under IRCTC's Rail Neer brand.

Rail Neer is popular among railway commuters, but IRCTC only manages to meet 37 percent of the demand for bottles of drinking water on trains.

A railway official told Financial Express that a mining site at Argada near Ranchi in Jharkhand has been identified for the purpose of setting up a bottling plant.

IRCTC currently has seven operational bottling plants in the country, with a combined production capacity of 8.3 lakh litres per day.

“Water will be supplied from the adjoining coal mines to this plant for purification. Mines have surplus groundwater which comes out as a result of coal extraction,” the railway official told the newspaper.

Every year, all of Coal India’s mines put together produce close to 5,700 lakh cubic feet per second (cusecs) of water, of which less than half gets utilised by the company itself. A further 1,091 lakh cusecs of water is supplied to villages and communities located around the mines.

At the end of each year, Coal India is typically left with surplus of more than 2,000 cusecs of water. “The plan is to put up plants wherever there is surplus water and a few sites have been identified. However as of now, it will start from Ranchi,” the above-mentioned official told the newspaper.

The plan is still in its nascent stages, with a techno-feasibility test yet to be conducted to determine how big the plant can be and how much it can produce.

The idea to use excess water produced at coal mines to produce drinking water was first suggested during railway minister Piyush Goyal’s meeting with all senior officials of Indian Railways earlier this year. Goyal also holds charge of the coal ministry at the moment.

The proposed plant at Ranchi is expected to produce around 1 lakh litres of potable water every day once operational. Apart from this, Indian Railways also floated tenders for seven more bottling plants in November.

Three of these seven plants – Vishakhapatnam, Kota and Bhubaneswar – with a combined capacity of 2.7 lakh litres of packaged water per day are expected to be up and running by March 2019.