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Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Wednesday met heads of top public sector companies to chart investment plan and address coal availability. Interacting with mediapersons here after the meeting, Arup Roy Choudhury, Chairperson and Managing Director of National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), said the Finance Minister spoke on the capital expenditure and investment plans of the company. He added that company plans to invest Rs. 200 billion in the current fiscal. “We are looking at about 200 billion rupees for the 12th Plan. How do we want to achieve our capex, what are the bottlenecks, which are coming to achieve the capex and how are we going to use our reserves that is what he wanted to know,” Choudhury said. Chairperson and Managing Director of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Sudhir Vasudeva, said the oil and gas major is sure about the capex plan and has conveyed the same to the Finance Minister. “We have explained our position and they just wanted to know about the certainties of these investments. We gave them our definite plans of investment, and they were satisfied with that,” he said. State-run Coal India , its Chairperson and Managing Director S. Narsing Rao said, is likely to make total capital investments worth Rs. 400 billion. “We have a plan for about Rs. 258 billion for the current Five Year Plan and another Rs.14, 500 crore, if certain conditions are fulfilled, so that takes us to 40,000 crores,” he said. According to media reports, the heads of the state-run companies were called upon to hasten their investment plans. The heads of the companies said Chidambaram also heard them on the shortage of coal. Coal shortages knocked 7.8 billion KWh off NTPC's capacity utilisation in the past year, denting its profit. The secretaries of different ministries dealing with the infrastructure sector also attended the meeting. Persistent economic sluggishness was reflected in data on Friday (August 31) that showed infrastructure output grew 1.8 percent in July from a year earlier, slower than annual growth of 3.9 percent in the previous month.

Chidambaram meets PSU heads to discuss investment path