Over 100,000 Indians killed in 2011-2012 due to coal emissions

15 March, 2013

The results of a latest study, titled Coal Kills, by Urban Emissions, commissioned by Conservation Action Trust and released in partnership with Greenpeace, have thrown up a shocking statistic. In 2011-2012 up to 1,15,000 people died a premature death due to emissions from coal-fired power stations in the country.

Apart from the deaths, there are millions of cases of respiratory distress, asthma, and heart disease that can be attributed to emissions from coal power plants. The monetary cost of this 'health crisis' is said to be between Rs 16,000 to 23,000 crore on an annual basis.

The conclusion reached by the commissioned study is based on investigating 111 coal power plants that generate 121 GW of power. It was carried out by Dr. Sarath Guttikunda and Puja Jawahar of Delhi-based, Urban Emissions. Dr. Guttikunda, TED Fellow and an adjunct faculty at the Desert Research Institute, Reno, USA said, "Thousands of lives can be saved every year if India tightens its particulate emissions standards, introduces emission limits for pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury and institutes mandatory monitoring of emissions at plant stacks, making the data publicly available in real time," as per a media release by Greenpeace.

As per the study, the Kolkata-West Bengal-Jharkhand and the Delhi-Haryana region are the most affected regions - with approximate deaths of 14,900 and 8,800 deaths respectively in 2012. The Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh-Jharkhand-Odisha coal region is the third most severe hit area of the country.

Debi Goenka from Conservation Action Trust said, "Indian standards for coal power emissions are either absent or shamefully behind those of even China, let alone the EU or US. Does the Ministry of Environment consider Indian lives to be less valuable? We need to immediately tighten pollution norms for existing plants, phase out the old, inefficient ones and ensure that all proposed new plants have state of the art pollution control systems such as flue gas desulphurisers and strict controls on nitrogen oxide, mercury and particulate emissions."

Greenpeace India has been carrying out a campaign to save and protect India's central forest region from coal mining since the last three years. In July 2012, it had sent a petition to the Prime Minister - asking him to stop all new coal block allocations and forest clearances for coal mining. A massive over 9,00,000 people have already signed this petition.