Gautam Adani bullish on prospects for India energy India is close to striking a political deal to end a major component of a long-running crisis over coal imports that has crippled the country's power sector and undermined overall economic growth, prominent industrialist Gautam Adani has said. A string of major Indian power companies, including Tata Power and Adani Power, a division of the self-made billionaire's ports-to-energy Adani Group, have seen their finances badly hit over the past year by increases in coal import prices. Indian regulations require power producers to strike pre-sale agreements over the price at which they will supply power to state electricity boards, deals which have traditionally been binding, even if a power producer's fuel costs rise. However, last month regulators ruled in favour of both Tata and Adani, the country's two largest private power generators by installed capacity, saying both companies ought to be able to pass on some portion of their increased costs to consumers. "The government is quite serious on this," Mr Adani told the Financial Times, referring to a new committee established to strike a deal between various state electricity boards and power producers. "I think in the next one month this committee will give their view in a report, and with that basically I think most of the difficulties facing the power sector will be removed," he said. India's inability to provide reliable and inexpensive power has been a major contributing factor to the country's slowing economic growth over the past year, while also damaging the competitiveness of a range of energy-intensive industries, from car making to cement. In spite of extensive domestic reserves, India's inefficient state-dominated mining sector is unable to produce sufficient coal to meet domestic demand, leading companies such as Tata and Adani to build large coastal power stations designed to be fuelled by coal imported from other countries including Indonesia and Australia. Mr Adani's group also operates India's largest private sector port and the country's largest coal import business, and has seen overall group revenues increase 16-fold over the past decade, to Rs399bn ($7.3bn) in 2012. Adani's expansion abroad has been especially ambitious, including the purchase of coal assets and a major port in Australia in a series of deals worth about $5bn since 2010, as part of a mining, rail and port development largely designed to provide fuel to the company's Indian power operations. This fast expansion abroad has severely stretched the group's finances, however, with net debt at Adani Enterprises, the group's holding company, reaching Rs695bn in 2012, according to Credit Suisse. Mr Adani, one of India's most prominent first-generation industrialists, said his company would issue new foreign debt in the coming month to repay existing lenders and allow further capital expenditure on the Australian project, while the group as a whole would contemplate equity sales to raise funds and reduce total debt. "We are coming out with a $1.5bn bond issue in the next 15 or 20 days, at the end of this month or the beginning of next month," he said.