Kolkata: Coal India said it is absorbing a sharp rise in input costs instead of passing them on to consumers, shielding coal users from higher prices despite surging expenses on explosives and industrial diesel.“Any pass-through of the mounting prices would lead to a cascading effect. The company is also compensating the increased price of the industrial diesel to the contractors operating in CIL’s mines, who purchase it in bulk quantities,” the CIL statement added.A key pressure point is ammonium nitrate, which accounts for about 60% of the raw material used to make explosives for CIL’s opencast mines. Its price jumped 44% from the pre-war level of Rs 50,500 a tonne to Rs 72,750 a tonne as of April 1, 2026.CIL said ammonium nitrate prices had remained steady from Aug 2025 to Jan 2026, before reaching Rs 50,500 per tonne on March 1, 2026, and then climbing sharply amid the West Asian crisis.“This sharp increase in the price of AN had a direct bearing on the cost of explosives that CIL uses in large quantities in blasting operations to uncover overburden and expose coal seams. As a result, the average cost of explosives shot up by around 26% from Rs 39,588 per tonne in February 2026 to Rs 49,783 per metric tonne by March-end,” CIL said.Across most CIL subsidiaries, industrial diesel prices surged around 54%, from Rs 92 a litre in mid-March 2026 to Rs 142 a litre in April 2026. The increase is significant given CIL’s scale of consumption. During FY26, the company used about 4.2 lakh kilolitres of diesel.
