Workers at coal-based power plants in Delhi are suffering from asthma, bronchitis, or TB; industries account for 11 per cent of Delhi’s air pollution. or 34-year-old Mahesh Raja the easiest way to keep respiratory problems at bay is to eat a piece of “jaggery”. He picked up this remedy while working at the Rajghat Power House (RPH) as a contractual labourer until the plant was recently shutdown. “Each worker was given Rs. 200 per month for buying jaggery. They (the administration) told us it would protect us from diseases like asthma,” recalls Raja who now works in a garage near the plant. He used to work in the pulverising mill of the coal-based plane, which is located just a few metres away from the Delhi Secretariat - the office of the Delhi government. A recent study by IIT-Kanpur suggests that industrial point sources contribute up to 11 per cent to Delhi’s air pollution which is not much compared to “road dust” that accounts for 36 per cent, but it cannot be ignored. While all major polluting industries were taken out of the city 15 years ago, the issue of thermal power plants has turned out to be a rather sticky point. Like Raja, hundreds of workers in the city’s two thermal power plants - RPH and Badarpur Thermal Power Station (BTPS) - have similar stories to tell. “While almost every other worker in these plants complains of asthma or bronchitis, there are others who suffer from TB (tuberculosis). Even masks fail in front of the large quantities of fly ash and dust,” said Rishi Pal, president, Delhi State Electricity Workers Union. From the workers to those performing clerical jobs, everyone working at these plants invariably inhales about 2-4 grams of dust or fly ash on an average, he adds. To keep a check on occupational health, the administration conducts an annual full-body medical check-up of its employees, but how far the records of each individual are maintained continues to be a grey area. A curious conundrum mars the functioning of these plants. RPH is shut as it doesn’t have any buyers for its power, but were it to be brought online, it significantly exceeds prescribed particulate-matter caps. The BTPS plant — run by the National Thermal Power Corporation — on the other hand has just one unit functioning and falls just shy of the prescribed limits. However, it is under pressure from the Delhi government to cease production. The plant has held out saying it conforms to Centrally-prescribed pollution guidelines and moreover, completely shutting it down could destabilise the grid. This has kept the DPCC in a fix on deciding about the fate of BTPS. “We may impose a penalty on the defaulting power generation companies for not following emission norms of 50 mg/nm3. The Environment department could go to the National Green Tribunal to invoke the ‘polluter pays principle’,” said Ashwani Kumar, DPCC chairman-cum-Secretary (Environment and Forests). Experts suggest that it is not only the plants that are to be blamed, but also the Centre and the DPCC which have been focussing only on certain pollutants, such as Particulate Matter (PM), over other equally toxic ones. Until last week, India had absolutely no standards for sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxide (NOx) and mercury which are the other pollutants of thermal power plants. “Under the new emission norms notified by the Centre, Delhi’s thermal power plants will have to keep their PM emissions below 100 mg/nm3. The impact will be even more pronounced for SO2, NOx and mercury emissions since these did not have norms,” said Chandra Bhushan, Deputy Director General, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Explaining the pollution control measures taken up by for BTPS, a senior NTPC official said, and “We have already carried out an additional pollution mitigation system to bring down the emission below 50 mg /nm3. This was done under R&M of 2 units of 210 MW each at the cost of Rs 59.42 crore. R&M work for upgradation worth Rs 94.25 crore of three other units of 95 MW each is pending for consideration before the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission.”