The Supreme Court verdict terming all coal block allocation since 1993 as illegal has had a major impact on metal and mining counters.
Worst hit were Jindal Steel and Power and Hindalco Industries – the two of the firms that won blocks during the time. JSPL, which cracked around 15 percent Monday, has bounced back after two days of intense selling. It witnessed some buying at lower levels on Wednesday.
In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Ravi Uppal, MD, JSPL, said investments worth around Rs 250,000 crore is at stake. “Hundreds of thousands of people are employed by this group so I don’t think Supreme Court has done any consolation.”
The company’s blocks in question are Gare-Palma-IV/1 (allocated in 1996), Gare-Palma-IV/2 (1998), Gare-Palma-IV/3 (1999), Utkal B1 (2003), Jitpur (2007) and Amarkonda Murgadangal, allocated in 2008.
“The coal blocks given to us had coal of extremely inferior quality with ash running between 45 percent and 50 percent. And when the list was drawn up in 1993, these coal blocks were among the list which were not on the agenda of production of Coal India and its subsidiary SECL. So they were not even considered worthy of production. That is why it was given to private companies. We happened to be the one who took the coal out of this ash. Normally you talk of ash in coal, but here in the blocks we had coal in ash,” he said.
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