India to merge underground coal mines to deploy longwall mining methods

To facilitate the induction of modern mining technology and equipment, India’s Coal Ministry is looking at merging underground mines in the same geographies and moving 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 impediments 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.