Shortage of OTR ( Off-The-Road ) tires may hit coal mines

DOMESTIC coal production from open cast mines may suffer to a considerable extent due to the non-availability of off-the-road (OTR) tyres from the international market. The tyres, meant for heavy duty dumpers, are in short supply and leading OTR tyre manufacturers have started refusing to take fresh orders at least for the next few years on the plea that they are over-booked.

The emerging tyre shortage has unnerved state-owned coal companies as well as the Union Ministry of Coal. Sources close to the Ministry fear that a good number of existing operational dumpers in large and medium-size opencast mines may become non-operational as replacement of tyres in old dumpers may not be possible due to the shortage of OTR tyres. This may lead to a fall in coal production.

A delegation comprising senior executives from the Ministry and Coal India Ltd (CIL) recently visited Japan and requested Japanese manufacturers to increase their tyre production to ensure adequate supplies of such tyres to Indian coal companies.

In fact, CIL has set coal production targets from open cast mines at about 301 million tonnes (mt) in 2005-06, 321 mt in 2006-2007, 334 mt in 2007-08, 386 mt in 2009-10, 412 mt in 2010-11 and about 473 mt in 2011-12. The requirement of dumpers would thus increase. CIL and its subsidiaries may require in 2011-12 a total of 142 units of 140-tonne-capacity dumpers, 125 units of 170-tonne capacity dumpers, about 400 units of 120/110 tonne-capacity dumpers and 1,225 units of 85 tonne-capacity dumpers. Accordingly, there will be higher requirement of OTR tyres. Incidentally, India does not produce OTR tyres. The country depends entirely on imports.

A CIL source said that they did not know as to how the tyre availability position can be improved unless the international producers/suppliers expand their capacities to ensure the easy availability of OTR tyres for keeping the dumpers operational, a pre-requisite to achieve higher production from open cast coal mines.

The source said that the Ministry plans to approach the Ministry of External Affairs requesting it to take up the OTR supply issue with various producing/supplying countries at the diplomatic level. This initiative is required because a substantial portion of the world production capacity is believed to have been booked by China for speculative trading purposes.

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