Montecarlo Construction is removing more than 650,000 million cu m of over-burden material at an open-cast quarry in Khadia.

Khadia, famous for its heritage houses, lies south of Central Ahmedabad. The city is the administrative headquarters of Ahmedabad district and is the judicial capital of Gujarat. With a population of more than 6.3 million, it is the fifth largest city and seventh largest metropolitan area in India.

India is the third largest coal producer in the world and the demand is expected to increase to more than 750 mt by 2015. The sector is driven by the increasing gap between power supply and demand due to economic growth.

Headquartered in Ahmedabad, Montecarlo Construction (MCL) is removing more than 650,000 million cu m of overburden material over a five-year contract at the NCL Singrauli coal quarry in Khadia. The coal is primarily used by five power plant customers in the region. The overburden removal contract tendered by Northern Coal Fields India a Government of India enterprise?was won by MCL and is worth Rs 459 million. MCL is one of the largest private sector construction companies in India that specialises in large scale civil construction and energy networks. The company was established in 1995 and with increasing business activities and lobalisation of the infrastructure industry, it became a public limited company in 2006. The overburden is caused by general coal mining operations and the sediment is a waste product consisting of coarse rock fragments and fine coal particles.

Volvo clears up
The Singrauli quarry produces 4 mt of coal every year, which means it also produces a large buildup of waste materials that needs to be removed from the site. In order to do this, the company uses a fleet of Volvo CE machines including five EC480 D-Series and three EC700 B-Series crawler excavators, 10 FM440 and 31 FM480 Volvo trucks, and is planning to add another five Volvo FM480 trucks to its fleet.

"Today, Montecarlo is experiencing rapid growth and needs strong and reliable machinery to conduct integral duties and operations," says Mrunalbhai Patel, Joint Managing Director and Founding Chairman of MCL. "The machines are imperative to drive progress and deliver targets on time. After careful evaluation of the options, we decided to buy Volvo construction equipment and trucks because they are reliable, efficient and we can count on them."

Volvo dealer, Alpha Technical Services, is supporting the company and has an office which holds spare parts at Singrauli to ensure any maintenance or service work is carried out quickly and efficiently. The machines were supplied to MCL by Volvo dealer, West India Equipment.

This is the company's first sole mining contract as it was previously working across three other mining sites and subcontracting a proportion of the work. The company is also one of the first companies in India to buy Volvo FM480 trucks.

By driving Narmada's water to the towns and villages of Gujarat, the company was awarded with its first irrigation project in 1996 and acquired its first road project in 1999 but since then, the company has gone on to build one of the longest express highways in Asia. MCLis an ISO 9001:2008 (QMS), 14001:2004 (EMS), OHSAS 18001:2007 (OHSAS) certified company for its civil construction and engineering project management.

MCL is a responsible company dedicated to quality, safety and the environment which is why the company chooses to use Volvo and its robust machinery.