Coal India Supplied a Record 70.3 Million Tonnes in October 2026 and Mined 67.2 Million, Its Best October, as the Company Turned 51 on 1 November

Coal India Limited dispatched 70.3 million tonnes (MT) of coal in October 2026, the most in any single month of its history, according to a Ministry of Coal statement issued on 1 November, the day the company turned 51. The same statement says CIL mined 67.2 MT in the month, its highest output for any October, and sent 57.1 MT to the power sector, also a monthly record. Dispatch beat the previous best of 69.4 MT, set in March 2026.

PTI, reporting CIL’s provisional data filed with the stock exchanges, gives the year-on-year changes as 19.3 per cent for production (from 56.4 MT in October 2025) and 18.7 per cent for offtake (from 59.2 MT). The ministry rounds both to 19 per cent. All figures here are provisional and are as of 6 November 2026.

What the statement and the filing say

The ministry’s list of October records has four items. Total supply was 70.3 MT. Supply to power producers was 57.1 MT, against a previous high of 56.5 MT in May 2024. Production was 67.2 MT, against an earlier October best of 62.47 MT in October 2024. Daily loading of rakes for the power sector averaged 310, against 302.8 a day in March 2025. A rake is the railway’s word for one full train of wagons.

Spread over the 31 days of October, 57.1 MT to power stations comes to about 1.84 MT a day (tuput’s arithmetic). ANI and IANS carried the same statement. The rail side of the story, including the railway’s own loading record for 1 to 18 October, is in our report on Indian Railways coal loading.

Supply and production are two different records

Offtake, which the ministry calls supply, is coal dispatched from the mines to buyers. Production is coal dug. The two usually move together but not month by month, because coal can be stacked at a mine and sent later.

The ministry’s opening line calls 67.2 MT the “highest-ever monthly coal production”. The body of the same statement, and the 62.47 MT figure it compares against, refer to October only. PTI reports that CIL produced 84.5 MT in March 2026, so the October number is a record for that month of the year and not for any month. The dispatch record is the all-time one, as the ministry states it, and the March 2026 figure of 69.4 MT is the earlier peak it names.

The October 2025 base was low. At 56.4 MT it was below October 2024’s 62.47 MT, so a 19 per cent rise on last year works out to 7.6 per cent above the earlier October record (tuput’s calculation from the two figures).

Which subsidiaries delivered

PTI’s breakdown shows where the 67.2 MT came from. Mahanadi Coalfields in Odisha produced 20.8 MT, up 25.3 per cent, the most of any subsidiary. South Eastern Coalfields produced 14.3 MT, up 17.4 per cent. Northern Coalfields mined 11.4 MT, Central Coalfields 7.3 MT (up 26.1 per cent), Western Coalfields 5.9 MT (up 64.7 per cent, the sharpest rise), Eastern Coalfields 4.6 MT (up 27.9 per cent) and Bharat Coking Coal 2.9 MT (up 7.1 per cent). Northern Coalfields was the one major subsidiary whose output fell, by 4.3 per cent.

On dispatch, Western Coalfields rose 50.2 per cent to 6.7 MT and Central Coalfields 44.7 per cent to 8.0 MT, while Mahanadi sent 20.6 MT and South Eastern 15.6 MT.

Why power stations needed the coal in October

October 2026 was a month of high demand. The Central Electricity Authority counted 96 power plants with less than three days of coal on 19 October, up from 60 in mid-September, according to a Reuters report on 22 October. A senior Power Ministry official told Reuters that dispatch to power stations had reached a record 2.6 MT a day across all suppliers, that peak daily demand was 45 to 50 gigawatts above a year earlier, and that weak hydropower, which the official tied to El Nino rainfall, had pushed more load onto coal. Business Standard carried the same remarks.

The Ministry of Coal said in a statement reported by News On AIR that stocks at coal-based plants had stayed above 18 MT since 29 September, at 18.205 MT on 10 October, and that 469 rakes a day were loaded for the power sector in the first ten days of October against 426 a day in September.

CIL is not the only source. Captive and commercial mines, which are run by companies other than CIL, produced 22.03 MT in October, up 42 per cent from 15.49 MT, and dispatched 21.11 MT, according to the Ministry of Coal as reported by the Free Press Journal. The ministry counts 87 such mines in operation after the Lohari mine in Jharkhand received its opening permission.

From 79 million tonnes to 768 million

CIL’s own account is of a company that was assembled in the 1970s. The Ministry of Coal’s history page says the government took over India’s coking coal mines on 16 October 1971 and nationalised them on 1 May 1972, with Bharat Coking Coal formed to run them. It took over the management of 711 more coal mines on 31 January 1973 and nationalised them on 1 May 1973, setting up Coal Mines Authority Limited in May that year. CIL was formed in 1975 as a holding company over the subsidiaries. The company observes 1 November 1975 as its founding day; the ministry’s history page says September 1975 and an older PIB backgrounder says 21 October 1975.

The ministry’s statement puts first-year production at 79 MT and the 2025-26 total at 768 MT, almost tenfold. CIL’s own page gives the exact figure of 768.19 MT of production and 744.83 MT of offtake for 2025-26, with 742.63 MT of the output from open-cast mines and 25.56 MT from underground ones. The Ministry of Coal’s statistics page records 781.056 MT for CIL in 2024-25 out of an all-India total of 1,047.523 MT, which makes CIL about three quarters of national output.

CIL’s chairman said at the golden jubilee event on 1 November 2025, as PIB reported it, that the company meets about 55 per cent of the nation’s energy requirements, and that it must diversify into renewable energy, coal gasification and critical minerals. The Pioneer’s April 2026 report on the PTI data adds that coal still accounts for roughly 70 per cent of India’s power generation. For the other side of that system, see India’s non-fossil power capacity and the Cabinet’s grid storage scheme.

What the first seven months of 2026-27 show

Over April to October 2026, CIL produced 388.2 MT, up 0.7 per cent from 385.5 MT a year earlier, and dispatched 454.6 MT, up 9.2 per cent from 416.2 MT, PTI reports. Dispatch therefore ran 66.4 MT ahead of output, and that coal came from stock already lying at the mines (tuput’s calculation).

The production target for 2026-27 is 815 MT, the ministry says. After seven months, 426.8 MT remain to be mined in November to March, an average of about 85.4 MT a month. CIL’s March 2026 output was 84.5 MT.