The presence of hidden or concealed faults in and around mine openings and excavations has always been a unique challenge to mine management. Typical to Indian mining conditions, the limited availability of geotechnical and structural data during exploration results in a vast data gap and uncertainty in mine planning. To define the structural complexity of the mine and adequacy of geotechnical data gathering, preliminary data from 200 coal blocks spread across different parts of India data were collated to determine the fault density, and an attempt was made to correlate its impact of mining operation and likelihood of fault induced operational and safety risks. Out of 200 coal block data assessed, it was observed that 109 coal blocks (55%) had no information about the faults in the borehole database gathered, indicating that either the deposits are free from major structural features such as faults or the borehole density adopted is not adequate to capture the existing structural complexities. To validate the challenges of near fault zones, data from 09 large operational opencast mines complied, and it was observed that mines with higher fault density showed indications of several issues ranging from slope instabilities, water seepage, migration of coal fire and gases, ore dilution along with hindrance to mine operations such as the deployment of a surface miner, highwall mining, re-organization of mine excavation schemes and sterilization of resources, among others. An analysis of “Fault Density versus Level of Exploration” showed a clear correlation with an R2 value of 0.53, with a mean fault density value of 0.2/sq.km and 1.40/sq.km for regionally explored and fully explored coal blocks, respectively. Fault density was very low in regional exploration compared to the detailed one, but operational mines even showed a higher number of faults, indicating significant gaps in early-stage structural database gathering.