India is one of the most important coal producing countries globally; majorly produces through opencast mining. However, environmental limitations and fast depletion of near the crust reserves is forcing to replace the opencast coal mining activity with effective underground mass coal production technology. One of such technology compatible with Indian mining scenario is continuous miner (CM) technology. India has already adopted this technology by implementing few of these machines to some of the underground mines, but the performance of majority of these machines are the matter of concern as they are not effective in terms of return on investment. This has exposed a broad arena of research for the improvement of productivity and finally of economy. This paper actually depicts the machine availability trend of a CM deployed in a mine belonging to one of the largest coal producing public company of the country. The availability of the overall system and subsystems were analyzed, a discussion was made with experienced mine personnel to obtain miner's perspective towards the lower availability of the system and sub-system. Finally appropriate recommendations were suggested to overcome the lower availability trend of the system and subsystems. Implementation of these remedial measures may not only improve the availability trend of the machine but also form a firm basis of development of a proper preventive maintenance programme for all such machines focusing on betterment of their performance in Indian scenario.
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