Hyderabad: Telangana Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramaraka on Thursday, August 6, visited the Caterpillar and Komatsu mining equipment manufacturing centres in Arizona and Texas as part of his United States tour. He was accompanied by senior officials of the Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) and GMMCO Ltd. In Arizona, the delegation reviewed live demonstrations of Caterpillar’s latest heavy earth-moving and mining equipment, including autonomous and tele-remote operated machinery, and discussed operator training and safety systems relevant to opencast coal mining operations. Modernising SCCL’s opencast fleetThe visits to Caterpillar and Komatsu are expected to yield direct benefits for SCCL’s operations by allowing the company to modernise its opencast fleet and improve operator safety by reducing manual exposure to hazardous zones. The tour will also prove crucial for the development of the newly acquired Tadicherla Open Cast-2 and PKOC-2 blocks, as well as for achieving Singareni’s annual production target of 100 million tonne, Bhatti said.