Rajarshi Dhar Selected as Director (Personnel), Bharat Coking Coal Limited

The Public Enterprises Selection Board has recommended Rajarshi Dhar, currently General Manager (HR) and Head of Department (PRB) at Coal India Limited, for appointment as Director (Personnel) at Bharat Coking Coal Limited. The recommendation now goes to the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet for final clearance before Dhar can formally take charge of the board-level post.

The Director (Personnel) at BCCL is a functional director position responsible for the company's human resources function, covering manpower planning, recruitment, promotions, transfers, employee welfare and training across a workforce spread over dozens of coal mines and washeries in the Jharia and Raniganj coalfields. In an operationally intensive company like BCCL, where large numbers of workers are engaged directly in mining, workshops and support functions, the personnel director's decisions on postings and industrial relations carry direct consequences for production continuity.

Dhar's current role at Coal India Limited, the parent company of BCCL, has placed him at the head of HR policy formulation as well as the PRB — Personnel Reference Book — function, which governs promotion and transfer rules across Coal India's subsidiaries. His work has centred on group-wide human resources policy at the Coal India corporate level rather than at a single subsidiary, giving him exposure to how HR decisions play out across all eight Coal India subsidiaries rather than one operating company.

Bharat Coking Coal Limited, headquartered in Dhanbad, was incorporated in January 1972 to operate coking coal mines in Jharkhand and West Bengal and remains India's largest coking coal producer, supplying roughly half the country's prime coking coal requirement for the steel sector. The company runs 36 coal mines and eight coal washeries, with four more washeries under construction, making the personnel function critical to keeping a large and geographically dispersed workforce staffed and functioning across underground, opencast and mixed mining operations.

Dhar takes up the personnel role at BCCL at a time when Coal India's subsidiaries have been under pressure to expand output to reduce India's coal import dependence, a push that has required recruitment and redeployment of manpower to newer opencast projects even as older underground mines in the Jharia belt wind down. Managing this transition without disrupting industrial relations has been a recurring challenge for personnel directors across Coal India's coking coal subsidiaries.

The appointment will fill a functional director vacancy on BCCL's board, which is currently headed by Chairman and Managing Director Samiran Dutta. Board-level HR leadership at BCCL has particular significance given the company's history of labour issues in the Jharia coalfield, where fire-affected areas and resettlement of mining-affected populations have required sustained coordination between the personnel department and state authorities in Jharkhand.

Dhar's appointment, once cleared by the ACC, will be for a tenure typically running until superannuation or a fixed term as specified in the PESB recommendation, following the standard process by which Coal India Limited feeds functional director talent into its subsidiary companies.

The Director (Personnel) post at BCCL has historically been filled through this PESB route, with candidates drawn from HR leadership positions across Coal India's subsidiaries or from the parent company's corporate HR function, as in Dhar's case. His selection follows interviews conducted by the board earlier this year, after which PESB forwarded its recommendation to the Ministry of Coal for onward transmission to the ACC for final approval, the customary process for filling functional director vacancies at Coal India's subsidiary companies.