Coal Crisis: Centre Warns States Against Exploiting Surging Power Prices

India, Asia's third-largest economy is facing large-scale outages as several power plants have low coal inventories amid a sharp spike in global energy prices.

The power ministry has warned states that federal power producers will curtail supplies of electricity to them if their utilities are found selling power on exchanges to take advantage of surging prices.

India, Asia's third-largest economy is facing large-scale outages as several power plants have low coal inventories amid a sharp spike in global energy prices.

Some states, instead of supplying electricity to their consumers, are imposing rolling power cuts known as load shedding, and selling power at higher prices to energy exchanges, the ministry said in a statement, without giving details.

States that do this risked having federally supplied power, known as unallocated power, cut, it said. If states are not serving their customers but are "selling power in the power exchanges at a higher rate, the unallocated power of such states shall be withdrawn and allocated to other needy states," the ministry said.