Coal India on Monday said its overall expenditure has come down 3.3 per cent between April and December 2020 on the back of a reduction in manpower.

Overall expenditure during the period was Rs 54,241 crore against Rs 56,079 crore during the same period a year ago.

The public sector miner said a major reduction was visible in employee benefit expenses which were down by Rs 735 crore. These include salaries of employees, performance-related pay of executives, performance-linked rewards of non-executives and provident fund contributions.

During the nine-month period, CIL’s manpower came down by 13,800. Total manpower stood at 2.72 lakh at the start of 2020-21. This was 3.22 lakh four years ago.

Coal India said in a statement that the organisation was becoming leaner through superannuation of around 13,000 employees per year and the trend of reduction is expected to continue for a few more years.

Employee benefit expenses comprise around 50 per cent of the company’s overall revenue expenditure.
Coal India further said provisioning of stripping activity was also down by Rs 2,894 crore during the nine month period.

Stripping activity is the quantity of overburden removed for the required coal produced. Overburden removal is another significant component of expenditure.

Reduction in expenditure however has not affected the output and offtake of the public sector miner which also waived performance incentives for power sector consumers estimated at around Rs 703 crore. This incentive is earned on account of increased supply by the miner above the committed contracted quantity of coal.

With cash flows of coal users affected in the pandemic, Coal India also did not press for penalty from its consumers for lifting lower quantities of fuel, the company said in its statement.