Twenty-two years ago, the Union government told the industries to smoke less.

It was a friendly push to the polluting industries to get cleaner tech, better pollution-cutting gear. Just a charter of demands from the government that went beyond then extant environmental laws.

Of the polluting industries, the coal-fired thermal power plants were told to voluntarily cut down the lung-clogging particulate matter emission, trap noxious sulphur dioxide puffs with newer devices and find ways to use less water.

A decade later, the government realised that very few had moved to clean up their act. Then came a kick in the pants for the power producers. In 2015, the government introduced stricter emission standards for power plants under the Environment Protection Act, which placed limits on emission of certain toxic gases for the first time.

Since then, The Reporters’ Collective has found, Association of Power Producers, an industry lobby group, and its members together wrote over 20 letters lobbying with the government to dilute the strict emission norms.

The association counts among its members Adani Group, Vedanta, JSW Energy, Reliance Power and several smaller firms.

The power producers’ repeated pleas did not go unanswered. The Modi government pushed the deadline four times since 2015 to install devices for trapping toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants. The latest extension was granted in November 2024, pushing the deadline to 2027.

That’s a lot of carrots for a defiant industry compared with the stick the farmers face for burning stubble. Research has shown that thermal power plants cause 240 times more pollution than farm stubble burning.

And now, Niti Aayog has laid the groundwork to shelve the sulphur dioxide pollution norms in total.

Read the investigation by Shreegireesh Jalihal into the power giants’ decade-long lobbying battle that stalled crucial pollution regulation.