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Is a ‘Green’ Revolution Poisoning India’s Capital?

India promised to burn its trash mountains and safely turn them into electricity. But a New York Times investigation found hazardous levels of toxic substances around homes, playgrounds and schools.

A landfill more than 200 feet tall towers over a neighborhood in Delhi, India.Credit...

By Maria Abi-Habib

Photographs by Bryan Denton

Reporting from Delhi

• Published Nov. 9, 2024

The trucks have lumbered through the capital for years, dumping loads of hot, acrid ash from thousands of tons of incinerated garbage close to playgrounds and schools.

Residents in the soot-stained homes nearby know what to expect: stinging eyes, constant migraines, hacking coughs of black spittle and shallow, labored breaths.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Burning the garbage was supposed to help solve one of Delhi’s most startling environmental crises: the giant mountains of trash that soar nearly 200 feet into the air and eclipse the capital’s skyline — putrid, 20-story slopes of waste that collapse and crush people, or catch fire in noxious blazes that last for days.

The government pushed a revolutionary plan. It promised to incinerate the trash safely in a state-of-the-art plant, turning the waste into electricity in an ingenious bid to tackle two major problems at once.

Instead, the government’s answer to its bursting landfills and boundless need for energy is exposing as many as one million people to toxic smoke and ash, according to air and soil samples collected by The New York Times over a five-year period.

Residents call it a mass poisoning.

Where The Times
found dangerous lead
and cadmium levels.

Trash
burning
plant

Polluted with
heavy metal

INDIA

DUMP
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We tested the smoke: Lead, arsenic and other toxic substances rain down on surrounding neighborhoods.

The ashes, still filled with hazardous pollutants, then get hauled away in trucks.

We followed the trucks for years — and found them illegally dumping the ashes in crowded neighborhoods like this one, next to schools, parks and homes.

We tested the ashes — and found toxic substances way above safety standards.

We also dug into the soil — and found that a schoolyard and a park were sitting right on top of toxic ash.

Children play in ashes as trucks come to dump more. The chemicals and heavy metals in the air and soil can cause birth defects, cancer and other life-threatening conditions.

Doctors and residents nearby point to a rise in miscarriages, lesions on their skin and frantic trips to the hospital gasping for air.

Graphics by Pablo Robles

Is a ‘Green’ Revolution Poisoning India’s Capital? - The New York Times

Both the smoke billowing from the plant and the ashes dumped near homes have been found to be toxic, and Indian officials are well aware of the dangers.

Internal government reports found that the plant pumped as much as 10 times the legal amount of dioxins — a key ingredient in the notorious Agent Orange herbicide deployed by the U.S. military in the Vietnam War — into the skies above Delhi.

Yet the government has doubled down on its strategy nonetheless, breaking the law by dumping toxic ash right near homes and vowing to build similar facilities in dozens of cities where tens of millions of people live.

Having surpassed China as the world’s most populous nation, India has nearly 60 cities with one million residents or more, making “waste to energy” plants like the one in Delhi a model of what the government calls its “Green Growth” future.

The plant, run with one of India’s biggest family business empires, even managed to get certified by the United Nations in 2011, earning the right to sell carbon credits on the global market because it uses trash, instead of fossil fuels, to generate electricity.

The problem is, many current and former workers at the plant say, there is nothing green about it.

“The plant was never regulated, and the government knows,” Rakesh Kumar Aggarwal, a former manager at the plant, told The Times before he died in 2020, months after we started reporting this article and collecting samples for testing. He said basic safety measures were routinely skipped to save money and emissions from the facility went untreated, spewing dangerous chemicals into the heart of Delhi.

“On paper, it looks fine, it’s burning tons of trash each day,” he added. “But it’s killing people.”

Independent lab tests commissioned by The Times found that in the central Delhi neighborhood where the plant sits, the average amount of hazardous chemicals and heavy metals in the air drastically exceeded safety standards.

While protests were once common against the plant, the government has clamped down on all demonstrations in Delhi in recent years. The neighborhood is mixed, Muslim and Hindu, and the government’s Hindu-nationalist agenda has often pitted the religious groups against each other across India, making it harder to join together to stop the pollution, Ms. Sri Raman and other residents say.

“The state that this country is in right now, it’s impossible to get Hindus to join with Muslims to fight,” Ms. Sri Raman said. “But Jindal’s pollution doesn’t affect me any different than a Muslim mother.”

“We both need to protect our families, to live,” she said.

A park on top of ash dumped from the Okhla plant. Many residents were unaware of the potential dangers.

Read by Maria Abi-Habib

Suhasini Raj contributed reporting from Delhi. Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.

Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent reporting on Latin America and is based in Mexico City. More about Maria Abi-Habib

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/world/asia/india-air-quality-trash.html