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Cleaning up coal in India

India’s Enforcement Directorate has filed charges of money laundering against a former minister of state for coal, Dasari Narayana Rao, and Naveen Jindal, a member of Parliament who also happens to be chairman of Jindal Steel and Power. This is the latest turn in a major corruption scandal in India, known as Coalgate, in which the coal ministry awarded a handful of companies lucrative mining rights on a noncompetitive basis. The charges are a hopeful sign that India is ready to clean up its coal industry. But much more needs to be done.

Coal mining has long enjoyed sweetheart status in India, whatever the social and environmental costs. An 1894 land acquisition law that became an instrument of abuse, eventually fueling a Maoist insurgency, was finally replaced this year by a statute promising transparency and fair compensation.

Even so, activists are regularly harassed and even assassinated by thugs paid by powerful business interests to force people from their land. Ramesh Agrawal, who used India’s Right to Information Act to expose an illegal coal-mining venture by Jindal Steel and Power in Chhattisgarh, was shot and left for dead after he refused to back off. He accuses Mr. Jindal of ordering the attack. Mr. Agrawal was honored with a 2014 Goldman Environmental Prize for his fight for the communities threatened by the venture.

Coal contributes 39 percent of the manmade carbon dioxide emissions that are altering the climate. India, with the world’s fifth-largest coal reserves, gets 59 percent of its electricity from coal, and, like China, is building coal-fired power plants at a rapid clip to meet rising demand. Some rare good news came recently from the United States Department of Energy’s National Carbon Capture Center, which said it would help an Indian start-up, Carbon Clean Solutions, test promising technologies to capture carbon emissions from power plants.

India is nowhere near ready to wean itself from coal, which it must do to make a dent in global carbon emissions. But reining in the worst abuses in coal’s extraction and limiting the worst pollution from coal-burning plants are important first steps toward cleaning up a dirty business.

Source: The New York Times