No shortage, reports of coal crisis baseless: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman

New Delhi: Amid reports of the ongoing coal shortage in the country, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stressed that there is no shortage and termed these as "absolutely baseless", saying India is a power surplus country.

Sitharaman said that Power Minister R K Singh went on record just two days ago when he said absolutely baseless information is floating around that there is probably shortage of coal, shortage of other inventories which will lead to a sudden gap in the supply demand situation in the energy consumption.

"Absolute baseless! There is no shortage of anything. In fact, if I recall the minister's statement, every power producing installation has the next four days' stock absolutely available within their own premises and the supply chain has not broken at all," Sitharaman said in Boston at Harvard Kennedy School on Tuesday.

During the conversation organised by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Sitharaman was asked by Harvard Professor Lawrence Summers about energy shortage and reports of reduced coal inventories in India.

"There are not going to be any deficiencies which may lead to any shortfall of supply. So that takes care of India's power situation. We are now a power surplus country.

Union Minister of Coal, Mines and Parliamentary Affairs Pralhad Joshi visited Dipka coal mine in the Korba district of Chhattisgarh on Wednesday and urged officials to scale up coal production there.

Pralhad Joshi also took to Twitter to inform about his latest visit to one of India's largest coal mines. While sharing some pictures from the spot, Pralhad Joshi tweeted: "Visited Dipka coal mine in @secl_cil today. It is one of India's largest coal mines in the Korba district of Chhattisgarh, with a capacity of 35 million tonnes per annum."

The Power Ministry on Wednesday said that there was no outage on account of power shortage in Delhi.

"As per the information received from Delhi discoms, there was no outage on account of power shortage, as the required amount of power was supplied to them," a ministry statement said.