Kolkata, Feb 21 (IANS): Coal India Limited (CIL) on Tuesday claimed that the adoption of the new and modern safety techniques brought down the number of fatalities and fatal accidents at the CIL mines to a record low during 2022.

According to a statement issued by CIL here on Tuesday, during 2022 fatalities hit an all-time low of 20, down by 31 per cent from the figure of 29 during the previous year of 2021.

As per the statement, fatal accidents during 2022 also reduced by one-third to 18 from 27 in 2021.

"Fatality rate per million tonnes of coal produced was 0.028 in 2022 decreasing significantly by 40 per cent against 0.047 of 2021. Coal production during the referred period has gone up by 71 million tonnes. CIL as a whole produced 688 million tonnes during the calendar year of 2022 against 617 million tonnes in the preceding year," the CIL statement read.

The CIL has claimed that following the implementation of the 'Root cause analysis techniques', the management was able to analyse the accident-causing factors during the course of exploration and thus adopted appropriate solutions to systematically prevent the mishaps.

CIL has signed a memorandum of understanding with Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad to train 100 executives of the public sector entity to equip them with the above mentioned techniques and solve the underlying safety hazards, the management has claimed.

It has also claimed to have adopted the 'Tool box safety talk' which helped the mining officers to assess safety-related hazards before beginning the mining operations.

"Safety supervisors have interaction on safety issues with miners. To inculcate safety alertness on a broader level, mine rescue and safety competitions are conducted at mine, area and company levels periodically," the CIL statement has read.

According to it, the CIL subsidiary, Western Coalfields Limited was ranked third in the mine rescue skills category in the International Mine Rescue Competition held in September 2022.