New Delhi: In January 2017, a letter marked “confidential” was hand-delivered to then Union power secretary Pradeep Kumar Pujari. The letter, signed by Reliance Power chairman Anil Ambani, sought the Union Ministry of Power’s  urgent support in the campaign by power producers to weaken pollution norms.

The Reporters’ Collective has found that the members of the Association of Power Producers, an industry lobby group, wrote over a dozen such letters to the government over the last decade calling to dilute the strict emission norms issued by the government in December 2015 to curb the levels of sulphur and nitrogen oxides the power plants emit. 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. In the latest extension granted in November 2024, the Ministry of Power pushed the deadline to 2027, agreeing to the power industry’s logic that they are facing “significant constraints”.

At present, only 8% of 537 thermal power plant units, both government and privately owned, have installed devices to cut sulphur dioxide emissions by the end of 2024–seven years after the first deadline imposed by the Union Ministry of Environment.

Internally, the government acknowledged a survey by KPMG, a multi-country consultancy company, which showed that the proposed standards on sulphur and nitrogen oxides emissions from coal plants that the industries are opposing are less stricter than what China, the European Union and the United States impose. But rather than clamping down on polluters, the government has allowed industry representatives to bend emission norms even as toxic emissions choke people across the country every year.

The government’s treatment of polluting power plants is in stark contrast to how farmers in the states neighbouring Delhi have been penalised for stubble burning. A recent research report by Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) showed thermal power plants cause 240 times more pollution than farm stubble burning.

In October 2024 alone, at least 18 farmers in Haryana faced arrests and 400 were banned from selling their produce at farmers’ markets for two years for burning farm stubble. But as The Collective found, the Union government went soft on big polluting industries after intense lobbying.

The persistent lobbying to convince the government about the impracticality of the norms has had such a sympathetic effect on the Ministry of Power that its then minister of state R K Singh said that “even human beings emit carbon dioxide,” in a January 2018 file noting that captured the heated discussion.

The dismissal not only created a false equivalence between carbon dioxide and noxious sulphur dioxide that can damage lungs but set the tone for the Ministry of Power’s rejection of the norms.

And there are chances that the sulphur dioxide emission norms might now be shelved in totality. India’s top government think tank NITI Aayog has recommended to the environment and power ministries to direct coal-based power plants to not buy the de-sulphurisation device, known as flue-gas desulphurisation systems that remove sulphur dioxide from the plants’ exhaust gases.

The Aayog cited a study to say “the data do not suggest that SO2 (sulphur dioxide) emissions from India coal-based power plants is adversely impacting the air quality.”

The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests originally set an emission reduction target of polluting industries in 2003 in the form of a charter called the Corporate Responsibility for Environmental Protection (CREP). This was a voluntary initiative that set specific targets for industries to reduce pollution and adopt cleaner technologies, beyond what then extant environmental laws prescribed.

CREP, however, did not impose limits on emissions of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide or mercury.

Thermal power plants had to reduce pollution by eliminating toxic pollutant emissions and adopt water conservation measures. However, most of the thermal power plants did not fully comply with the targets in the charter even after a decade.

“Recent studies show that very few of the coal based thermal power plants have implemented what had been agreed in the CREP,” noted then environment secretary Ashok Lavasa in March 2015 in a letter to then power secretary Pradeep Kumar Sinha.

In December 2015, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change introduced stricter emission standards for power plants under the Environment Protection Act. Under the new norms, limits were placed on emissions of certain toxic gases for the first time.

The government proposed capping sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide gases that coal-fired power plants spew in high amounts. It internally acknowledged that they are harmful to human health. It cited a 2015 IIT Kanpur study that had called for “stronger control” on sulphur dioxide emissions since they contribute to high particulate matter in the air in Delhi-NCR. “The key contaminant in fuel that is responsible for high levels of pollution is sulphur,” an environment protection body set up for NCR had noted. Power plants were one of the major sources for this type of pollution. 

India had a reason to worry: A 2019 report by Greenpeace said India is the largest emitter of sulphur dioxide in the world, with most coming from coal-fired plants.

India’s power sector was against the new norms. In the last 10 years, the Association of Power Producers alone wrote over 20 letters to the government, in addition to separate letters by members, calling for lowering emission norms.

Lobbying, which is largely unregulated unlike in the West, is part of any corporate association’s job. And the Association of Power Producers has been good at it. However, neither the government nor the associations disclose to the public attempts to sway policy decisions, even when it involves a clash between private profits and people’s health.

The Reporters’ Collective had revealed how the association lobbied to get the Union Ministry of Coal to open up one of India’s densest patches of forests for mining despite repeated warnings from its own experts and the Ministry of Environment. Adani Group, one of the key members of the association, eventually bagged the coal block.

In the case of emission norms, too, disagreements erupted between ministries of environment and power, and dragged on for years. The Ministry of Power  aligned itself with the association, just like how the Ministry of Coal did during mining.

Power ministry officials noted on file that the environment ministry had issued the new norms despite the fact that they had not agreed to it since they found the new norms “stringent”.

In multiple correspondences with the Ministry of Environment and power regulators, the Ministry of Power regularly promoted the interests of the polluters, often using statements and arguments directly copied from industry representatives.

Power industry members repeatedly complained about the cost of cutting emissions, lack of analysis of the economic consequences and stringency of norms.

Their main arguments were that the emission norms were impractical compared with the state of the economy and excessively stricter than those put forward by the World Bank. They also pointed out that the emission cutting gear was expensive, has to be imported and hasn’t proven its effectiveness.

Some estimates suggested that it would cost Rs 1-2 crore per megawatt of electricity. For a unit with a capacity of 600 megawatts, installing this device would cost between Rs 600 crore and Rs 1,200 crore.

Additionally, they argued that sourcing limestone, which is required in large amounts to install sulphur-trapping devices, is tough in India.

India’s pollution watchdog, Central Pollution Control Board, has over time responded to these concerns. “It is not correct that standards are lacking groundwork and developed without detailed study,” it said in response to the association’s concerns.

“The standards were revised considering all aspects including availability of technology,” the board said.

It also pointed out that the norms introduced were not stringent and that the World Bank had never introduced standards but only outlined guidelines for emissions.

The Collective found, in the Ministry of Power’s records, that a survey by KPMG had found that emission standards in the US and China were more stringent than the ones the Ministry of Environment wanted to impose.

Most importantly, the Ministry of Power changed the rules on buying electricity from power producers to ease the cost burden in installing anti-pollution gear.

This was how it was done: Distributors buy electricity from producers offering the lowest rate. Since installing anti-pollution gear raises costs, producers who have done so would have to sell at higher prices than those who haven’t. This would hurt their ranking in the merit order dispatch—a ranking system drawn up by regulators in which cheaper electricity gets priority to keep power prices low. To fix this, the government changed the rules in 2018, allowing producers to offer electricity to distributors without including the gear’s cost upfront, so they remain competitive. 

But the association continued its campaign, which it termed as a “battle” in its annual reports. It even publicly bragged about how it manoeuvred the government to circumvent the apex court.

In June 2020, the Supreme Court came down heavily on the power sector, which was asking for extensions to install the anti-pollution devices. The initial deadline was 2017, which was pushed to 2022.

The association had approached the court asking for a further extension up to 2024. The court said that the environment ministry cannot grant extensions unless it can furnish a rationale for the move.

The association seized the opportunity.

“APP changed its strategy and made several representations to MoP (Ministry of Power), MoEFCC (Environment Ministry) and PMO (Prime Minister’s Office),” said an annual report of the association.

In its presentation to the government, the association said most power projects were not doing well financially and installing the devices would therefore not be possible immediately given the costs involved.

It padded up its argument by talking of a “potential opportunity to boost the Atmanirbhar Bharat vision by providing sufficient time to the domestic manufacturers to ramp up their capacity” (to produce flue gas desulphurisation devices).

The association said it was “able to convince the Ministry of Power to write a detailed letter to MoEFCC ( environment ministry) in support of extension of timelines for 2 years.”

“With pressure from APP and appropriate intervention from some of our members, MoEFCC finally issued an amendment on the last day of the Financial Year, extending the timelines for compliance for the TPPs (thermal power plants)...This notification was a major triumph for APP’s advocacy efforts as it was obtained without having to resort to legal challenge,” it said in its report. 

The jubilant power giants appear to be out of breath, and so are the millions of poor.