India’s Nine-Month Coal Production Falls 2.7%, India Coal Says

India’s coal production fell by 2.7 percent in the first nine months of the year that started April 1, India Coal Market Watch said, without mentioning where it got the information.

Output was 359.8 million metric tons from April to December compared with 369.8 million tons a year earlier, the newsletter said. Production was 8 percent less than a state-set target of 391.48 million tons.

Output in December rose 5.6 percent to 52.8 million tons from a year earlier and was 11 percent higher than in November, according to the newsletter.

The target for the year ending March 2012 is 554 million tons. India’s coal production was 533 million tons in the year ended March 2011, compared with a targeted 573 million tons, it said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Dinakar Sethuraman in New Delhi at dinakar@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Alexander Kwiatkowski at akwiatkowsk2@bloomberg.net