Which of the following statements with regard to Coal India Limited (CIL) is/are true? 1. CIL has its headquarters at Kolkata. 2. CIL operates through 82 mining areas spread over twenty provincial States of India. 3. CIL is the single largest coal-producing company in the world. Select the correct answer using the code given below.
- (a)1 only
- (b)1 and 3 only
- (c)2 and 3 only
- (d)1, 2 and 3
Correct — B, 1 and 3 only. Statement 1 is right: Coal India Limited is headquartered at Kolkata, where it has occupied Coal Bhavan in New Town, Rajarhat since moving from its older address. Statement 3 is right as well: CIL is the largest coal producer in the world by output, a position it has held for years on the strength of India's demand for thermal coal. Statement 2 is where the item is decided, and it fails on the count of states rather than on the count of mining areas. CIL operates through 83 mining areas — a figure that shifts by a unit or two between annual reports, so 82 is within the range the company itself has published — but those areas lie in eight states of India, not twenty. The company works through eight wholly owned subsidiaries, and their command areas run across Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Assam. Twenty is a large enough exaggeration to be caught even without knowing the exact number, because India's coal is concentrated in one geological belt.
- (a)1 only — Correct about the headquarters but wrongly rejects statement 3. CIL's standing as the world's largest coal producer by output is not in doubt.
- (c)2 and 3 only — Keeps the false statement and drops the true one. Statement 2 fails on the number of states, and the Kolkata headquarters is a matter of record.
- (d)1, 2 and 3 — The all-of-them pick, defeated by statement 2 alone. The mining areas number in the eighties, but they are spread over eight states, not twenty.
Coal India Limited was created in 1975 to hold the collieries nationalised in the previous two years, and it is now a Maharatna public sector undertaking. It works through eight wholly owned subsidiaries — Eastern, Bharat Coking, Central, Western, South Eastern, Northern and Mahanadi Coalfields, together with the Central Mine Planning and Design Institute — each with its own command area. India's coal is overwhelmingly Gondwana coal, concentrated in the Damodar, Son, Mahanadi, Godavari and Wardha valleys, which is why the mines cluster in a handful of states.
The geography is the shortcut. India's commercial coal comes from a belt running across the eastern and central peninsula; there is no coal mining worth the name in the southern states beyond Telangana, none along the western coast, and none in the north-west. A claim that a coal company operates in twenty states should therefore look wrong on sight, and it is. Note how the statement is built: the number of mining areas is close enough to the real figure to feel authentic, and the error is buried in the second half. That is a common construction in public-sector questions, and the defence is to check each number in a statement separately rather than judging the sentence as a whole. Statement 3 is also worth stating precisely — the claim is about output, and it is the single largest coal-producing company, not the largest coal-producing country.
- Coal India Limited is headquartered at Coal Bhavan, New Town, Rajarhat, Kolkata.
- CIL operates through 83 mining areas across eight states of India.
- It is described as the largest coal producer in the world by output.
- It has eight wholly owned subsidiaries, including the Central Mine Planning and Design Institute.
- Singareni Collieries Company Limited, in Telangana, is India's oldest government-owned coal mining company and lies outside the CIL structure.
- Judging a compound statement as a whole; here the mining-area count is nearly right and the state count is badly wrong.
- Confusing the largest coal-producing company with the largest coal-producing country — India is second, China first.
- Assuming Singareni Collieries is a CIL subsidiary; it is a separate company jointly held by Telangana and the Centre.
As a statements-and-code item with one planted number, or through the subsidiary-to-coalfield pairing.
Which one of the following is the first and the oldest Government-owned coal mining company in India?
- (a) Neyveli Lignite Corporation
- (b) Singareni Collieries Company Limited
- (c) Coal India Limited
- (d) Mahanadi Coalfields Limited
Answer(b) Singareni Collieries Company Limited
The same industry, and the pairing that keeps the two companies straight. Singareni is the older government-owned miner and sits outside the CIL structure; Coal India, created in 1975 after nationalisation, is the larger one and the one this 2020 item is describing.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Coal India Limited has its registered headquarters in which city?
- (a)Ranchi
- (b)Kolkata
- (c)Bhubaneswar
- (d)Nagpur
Answer(b) Kolkata — at Coal Bhavan in New Town, Rajarhat, from where its eight subsidiaries are directed.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which one of the following is NOT a subsidiary of Coal India Limited?
- (a)Mahanadi Coalfields Limited
- (b)Northern Coalfields Limited
- (c)Singareni Collieries Company Limited
- (d)Bharat Coking Coal Limited
Answer(c) Singareni Collieries Company Limited — a separate company in Telangana, jointly held by the state government and the Centre.