  The ICAL at INO is designed to mainly observe the muons produced in the
charged current interactions of atmospheric muon neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.
The track of the muon is reconstructed using the hits they produce in the
detector. From this track, the charge, the energy and the direction of the muon
are estimated, which are used to do oscillation physics analysis. In a large
fraction of events, a number of hadrons are also produced in addition to the
muons. The charged hadrons also leave hits in the detector which can be
utilized to estimate the hadron energy. In this work, we study the relation
between hadron hits, defined to be the difference between the total number of
hits and the muon track hits, and the hadron energy. We find that a
non-negligible number of baryons are produced in atmospheric neutrino
interactions. For E(had) < 5 GeV, almost all the hadron energy is carried by
these baryons. Finally, we formulate a procedure by which the hadron energy can
be estimated from the number of hadron hits.
