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1. Introduction
The Indian coal industry plays a pivotal role in the country’s rapid pace of development. After the nationalization of coal mines in the 1970s, Indian coal mining companies are almost totally owned by Government of India with Singareni Collieries Company Limited and Coal India Limited and its eight subsidiary companies undertaking coal mining in different regions of the country which accounts for nearly 95 percent of national coal production (Mohanty and Goyal, 2012). India is ranked 3rd amongst the coal producing nations globally in terms of production with a total production of 283.9 million tons and is ranked 5th in terms of coal reserve with a total coal reserve of 60,600 million tons in 2015 (BP London, 2016). During the last decade, in spite of doubling its production and being among the top in terms of global coal production, Indian coal mining industry has been facing challenges of demand-supply mismatch leading to persistent energy shortages and entailing to import coal mainly from Indonesia, Australia and South Africa (Institute for Energy Research, 2015). So, in order to sustain competitiveness in the dynamic global economic environment, it is necessary to analyze the internal and external factors influencing the core competence of the mining sector. The literature revealed that such studies in context of the Indian coal mining industry is scarce (Kumar and Rathore, 2015; Kanungo, 2013). Hence, to bridge this gap, this study is conducted using strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) approach to determine and prioritize strategies that will ensure the proper exploration and exploitation of Indian coal mines and the overall improvement of the industry. SWOT analysis is an effective tool for strategy formulation and implementation. SWOT is the acronym of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. SWOT analysis is a systematic environmental analysis method commonly used to categorize and find a good fit among the key internal and external factors providing a framework for identifying and formulating strategies (Kangas et al., 2003; Kotler, 1997; Kurttila et al., 2000). The internal factors constitute the strengths and weaknesses while the external factors include the opportunities and threats (Markovska et al., 2009).
The purpose of the study is to quantify the SWOT analysis for the Indian coal mining industry using Fuzzy Decision-Making Trial...