NTPC Integrated Annual Report 2025-26: A Review

NTPC generates close to a quarter of India's electricity, most of it from coal, and it is building towards a portfolio in which renewables, storage and nuclear make up more than half of its capacity by 2037. In FY 2025-26 it added a record 9.6 GW, most of it renewable, and reported its highest ever consolidated profit. The Integrated Annual Report 2025-26, themed "Powering Sustainable Progress Towards Viksit Bharat", is clear about where the company wants to go. It is much less clear about what that journey does to its emissions, and about why profit rose.

As with every review in this series, we read the published PDF against the <IR> Framework, SEBI's BRSR Core expectations and plain readability, and score it on the same seven-point card. Scores are our opinion. Screenshots are small excerpts reproduced for review and remain the copyright of NTPC Limited; the full report is on the company's investor pages.

The scorecard

What the report is

The Directors' Report describes this as NTPC's 50th annual report and 7th integrated annual report. It runs to 556 printed pages in four tabbed parts. Our Group's Overview and Innovating for Sustainability together form the integrated section (pp. 2 to 105), which covers the highlights, a chapter on India's twin goals of Viksit Bharat and net zero, the Chairman and Managing Director's letter, board and senior management profiles, the business verticals, the value creation model, materiality, risk, ethics and vigilance, and the six capitals. Statutory Disclosures (pp. 106 to 193) holds the Directors' Report, MD&A, corporate governance and CSR reports and the secretarial audit. The standalone and consolidated statements, each followed by the C&AG's comments, and the AGM notice make up the rest.

"About the Report" (p. 2) says the report follows the principles and content elements of the <IR> Framework, "now under the purview of the IFRS Foundation", alongside GRI, BRSR, the SDGs and the UN Global Compact. It gives the boundary (financial disclosures for the group; non-financial for NTPC and the subsidiaries and joint ventures it controls), names TUV India Private Limited as the assurer of the BRSR Core indicators under ISAE 3000, and says the temporal and material boundaries "have been reviewed and approved by senior management". There is no Board statement of responsibility. The BRSR itself is not in the document; the Directors' Report points to the website.

NTPC has a record in this field: ICAI's results post lists it as a joint gold shield winner in the public sector category of the SAFA Best Presented Annual Report Awards for 2022.

Key number: 358.00 million tCO2e. NTPC's Scope 1 emissions for FY 2025-26, printed once on page 76, without the previous year's figure beside it.

Strategy and narrative: 3/5

The strategy is easy to state and the report states it. The corporate plan table (p. 26) sets out capacity by source: 149 GW by FY2032, of which 83.6 GW thermal, 60 GW renewables, 4.7 GW hydro and 0.7 GW nuclear, rising to 244 GW by FY2037 with 97 GW thermal, 136 GW renewables and 6.3 GW nuclear, plus 22 and 52 GWh of battery storage. The Directors' Report adds the share that matters: renewables from 13% of installed capacity today to 44% by 2032 and 56% by 2037. The "Energising India's Growth" chapter (pp. 12 to 15) is a readable account of India's power transition, drawing on NITI Aayog's scenarios, and notes that in NITI Aayog's scenarios coal capacity peaks "around the mid-2040s".

The business verticals chapter (pp. 26 to 37) gives each line of business a highlights box with numbers: 1.52 million tonnes of biomass sourced, 46.52 BU traded, 48.65 MMT of captive coal, an 18 GW pumped storage portfolio. The nuclear pages set out the Mahi Banswara project through ASHVINI and an ambition of 30 GW by 2047 (p. 28), which sits oddly beside the 6.3 GW the corporate plan shows for 2037 and deserves a sentence of reconciliation.

The contents page promises "Letters to the Stakeholders"; there is one, from the Chairman and Managing Director. It opens with global energy security, gives the year's numbers (89.1 GW installed, 432.2 BU generated, 72.04% coal PLF, record profit) and lists four priorities. There is no CFO's letter, and nothing in the narrative engages with the obvious tension: of the 34,188 MW under construction, 16,520 MW is coal (Directors' Report), and thermal capacity is planned to rise to 97 GW. The MD&A's SWOT names declining coal PLF and underused gas as weaknesses, but not emissions.

Integrated thinking and the capitals: 3/5

The value creation model (pp. 38 to 39) has the right parts: inputs for all six capitals with numbers (net worth of ₹2,03,023.74 crore, green capex of ₹25,127.52 crore, 18,451 employees, R&D of ₹583.19 crore, CSR of ₹487.59 crore), a value chain from coal sourcing to customer billing, outputs, outcomes and a column of what each stakeholder group gets.

Read closely, it is less connected than it looks. The outcomes are five sentences ("Powering the nation reliably", "Driving the clean energy transition") and the stakeholder column is a pair of phrases each ("Consistent dividend returns", "Climate leadership commitment"). Natural capital's first input is "0.49% of Energy from Renewable sources", unexplained and at odds with the 7.6% non-fossil share of generation on page 76. Emissions, the largest thing NTPC takes from natural capital, don't appear in the model at all; "Avoided CO2 Emission - 31.5 million tonnes" does.

The capitals chapters follow a consistent pattern with SDG mapping and a highlights strip, and several are substantive: the financial capital chapter breaks the ₹49,067.87 crore capex into renewables, hydro, environmental infrastructure and nuclear, and the manufactured capital chapter carries a station-by-station capacity and generation table. But the chapters rarely refer to each other or to material topics, and "green capex" includes ₹3,280.90 crore of emission control and ash infrastructure at coal plants, which a reader may not expect under that label.

BRSR and ESG integration: 2/5

This is where a coal-heavy generator's report is tested, and where this one is weakest. The GHG section (p. 76) gives group Scope 1 emissions of 358.00 million tCO2e, Scope 2 of 0.71 million, an intensity of 830.02 g/kWh, a 2% fall in intensity and a 7.6% non-fossil share of generation. It says NTPC tracks Scope 1, 2 and 3, and that intensity is "the primary decarbonisation progress metric".

What is missing matters more than what is there. There is no prior-year Scope 1 figure, so the reader can't tell whether absolute emissions rose or fell. There is no Scope 3 number. There is no company target of any kind, absolute or intensity; the report refers to India's Panchamrit goals and to a net zero roadmap it is "co-developing" with NITI Aayog. And there is no discussion of what the corporate plan does to absolute emissions when thermal capacity grows from about 72 GW of coal and gas today (p. 60) to 97 GW. Against 358 million tonnes, the 6,000 tonnes a year of commissioned CO2 capture described on page 78 is a research project, and the report would be more credible for saying so.

Materiality is thin. The process (p. 42) lists five generic steps and cites SASB, MSCI and S&P ratings as sources, and the matrix (p. 43) plots 17 topics against internal and external importance. There is no date, no count of stakeholders, no statement of who approved the results and no link from topics to targets or chapters.

Safety data is partial: LTIFR of 0.027 for employees and 0.065 for workers, one and 19 recordable injuries, and 27,701 near misses (p. 86). The word "fatality" doesn't appear anywhere in the 556 pages; for a company with this workforce and contractor base, that figure belongs in the integrated report, not only in a BRSR on the website. The report's own numbers also disagree in places. Biomass pellets received since inception are "3.105 million tonnes" on page 27 and "3.105 Lakh MT" on page 64; contracts awarded are 3.08 million tonnes on page 27 and 10.18 million MT on page 64. Ash utilisation is 107% in the capitals chapters and "~106%" in the MD&A.

Governance disclosure: 3/5

The public sector parts of governance are handled well. The Directors' Report states that the C&AG, in letters dated 1 August 2026, gave "NIL comments" on both the standalone and consolidated statements after its supplementary audit, and the letters are reproduced after each auditors' report (pp. 360 and 539), with an annexure listing which group entities the C&AG audits. The emphasis of matter paragraphs (the transfer of coal mines to NTPC Mining and the fly ash reserve accounting) are summarised with management's comments.

The corporate governance report is also candid about the Board. The approved composition is 16 directors, including eight independent; at 31 March 2026 there were 13, with five independent, so independent directors were fewer than half the Board throughout the year. The report lists the resulting non-compliances for three years, the NSE and BSE fines (₹27,19,900 each for the Board composition breach across five quarters, per the secretarial audit), and BSE's waiver of ₹31,03,400 of earlier fines. It explains, correctly, that the power to appoint directors sits with the President of India through the Ministry of Power. Few reports in this series set out a governance failing so plainly.

What holds the score at 3 is the integrated section. There is no Board statement of responsibility for the integrated report, only senior management approval of its boundaries. The risk chapter (p. 44) describes the Risk Management Committee as chaired by the Director (Projects), while the Directors' Report lists an independent director as its chair after the July 2026 reconstitution; the integrated section wasn't updated. The ethics and vigilance chapter is detailed on process but reads as a list of initiatives.

Financial storytelling: 3/5

The integrated section includes a five-year standalone table (pp. 56 to 57) with revenue, expenses, tax, regulatory deferral movements, balance sheet, ratios and value added per employee, and the MD&A walks through every line of the standalone income statement with reasons. Both are useful.

The table also shows what the narrative leaves out. Standalone profit before tax fell 4.6%, from ₹23,636.40 crore to ₹22,556.93 crore, and revenue from operations fell 2.7%. Profit after tax rose 17.9% because tax expense became a credit of ₹3,503.61 crore, against a charge of ₹7,299.69 crore the year before, partly offset by a negative regulatory deferral movement of ₹2,898.32 crore. Note 22 explains why: in view of the company's "expected transition to the new tax regime", deferred tax was remeasured at 25.168% instead of 34.944%, cutting deferred tax by ₹7,561.43 crore. The consolidated picture is the same: profit before tax and regulatory deferral fell from ₹28,496.41 crore to ₹27,133.56 crore, and total tax was a credit of ₹2,876.42 crore.

None of this reaches the narrative. The Chairman's letter calls ₹27,546 crore the "highest-ever consolidated Profit After Tax". The MD&A attributes the standalone rise to "higher regulated equity", dividend income from group companies, favourable tariff orders and the CERC amendment. The highlights page (p. 10) charts EBITDA and PAT, not profit before tax. A reader who relies on the front half will not learn that this year's record owes its growth to a tax remeasurement.

Design and readability: 3/5

The integrated section is compact at about 104 pages, the section tabs and home icon run across every page, and the business verticals chapter's highlights boxes make a sprawling group readable. The station-wise capacity and generation table is the kind of reference data utility reports often omit.

Against that, the document is 556 pages of two-page spreads, the senior management section is a two-page roster of 66 executives, the Prime Minister's Internship Scheme gets close to a page of round-by-round statistics, and a half-spread photograph of an office building sits next to the India map. The numerical conflicts noted above (biomass, ash utilisation, a dividend payout of 37.68% in the letter and 37.67% in the Directors' Report) point to sections produced separately and not reconciled.

Digital version: 3/5

NTPC's annual reports page, which we confirmed, offers the report as a PDF download only; we found no online or HTML edition, and the PDF doesn't reference one. The PDF has a text layer, a hyperlinked contents page and a home link on almost every page, and its web links (to policies, board profiles, the annual return) work as links. But it has only five bookmarks, named after the InDesign files ("NTPC_Initial Pg_AR_25-26_13-8-26_For Double Spread Final"), every inside page is a two-page spread, and the C&AG's letters and their annexures are scanned images with no searchable text.

What reporting teams can take from it

Copy the corporate plan table: capacity by source for two target years is the most useful single exhibit a utility can give. Copy the candour of the corporate governance report on Board composition, and the practice of reproducing the C&AG's comments with an annexure of which entities it audits.

Then print absolute emissions with the previous years beside them, set a company target and show Scope 3; date the materiality assessment and say who approved it; put the fatality count in the integrated report; explain the tax line wherever the profit is celebrated; reconcile the numbers across sections before release; and publish single pages with proper bookmarks and text-searchable audit letters.

Series scorecard

Every report in this series is scored on the same seven-point card by the same reader. Scores are editorial opinion of the published document; each review carries the page references behind its findings.