Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Indian power utilities fell short of the capacity needed to meet the government’s target for power generation by 85 percent in October, according to data from the Central Electricity Authority.

Plants added 345 megawatts last month compared with a target of 2,373 megawatts and 2,121 megawatts a year earlier, the state monitoring authority said on its website.

Electricity production last month rose 4.9 percent to 74,083 million kilowatt-hours, it said.

--Editors: John Chacko, Alexander Kwiatkowski

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

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