A city-based environment group has written to the Union environment ministry registering its objections to the latest draft notification pertaining to the use of fly ash, a by-product of coal combustion by thermal power plants (TPP). The draft notification, which aims to achieve “100% utilisation of fly ash by coal- or lignite-based thermal power plants” and “sustainability of fly ash management system”, is open for public feedback for a period of two months from April 22.
The Conservation Action Trust (CAT), an environment group headquartered in Ghatkopar, has submitted 20 comments on the draft notification, which can be accessed on the ministry’s website. Experts who spoke to Hindustan Times expressed concern at three broad additions to the draft rules, which were last amended in 2016.
The first of these is the inclusion of a clause that imposes penalties on power plants that do not meet their targeted utilisation of fly ash, as included in paragraph 20 of the draft rules. “In the first two years of a three-year cycle, if the coal/ lignite-based thermal power plant… has not achieved at least 80% ash utilisation, then such non-compliant TPPs shall be imposed with a fine of ₹1,000 per tonne on unutilised ash during the end of financial year… If it is unable to utilise 100% of ash in the third year of the three-year cycle, it would be liable to pay a fine of ₹1,000 per tonne of unutilised quantity on which fine has not been imposed earlier,” the draft rules state.
It also go on to state, “In case a TPP achieves the ash utilisation of any particular cycle after imposition of fine in subsequent cycles, the said amount shall be returned to TPP after deducting 10% of the fine collected on the unutilised quantity during the next cycle. Deduction of 20%, 30%, and so on, of the fine collected is to be made in case of utilisation of ash in subsequent cycles.”
The provision for recovery of fines has so far been in the purview of courts, and while experts agreed that it is step in the right direction to include such a provision in law, they also said that allowing for refunds is a contradictory move. “So it is not really a penalty at all, it is more of a security guarantee, against which violations will continue. The draft notification also states that collected penalties should be used for safe disposal of unutilised fly ash, whereas it should be used to rehabilitate communities that are most affected fly ash pollution,” said Debi Goenka, who authored CAT’s comments, dated May 27.
Yet another clause which experts have taken issue with is included in paragraph five of the notification and addresses the issue of legacy fly ash, which has not been defined in previous versions of these rules. “Unutilised accumulated ash i.e. legacy ash, which is stored before the publication of this notification, shall be utilised progressively by TPPs in such a manner that the utilisation of legacy ash shall be completed fully within 10 years from the date of publication of this notification. This would be over and above the utilisation targets prescribed for ash generation through current operations of that particular year,” stated the draft notification.
Describing this clause as an attempt to “kick the can down the road,”, Goenka said the problem of legacy fly ash has itself arisen from the failure of power generators to comply with previous iterations of fly ash compliance rules. “We are now giving violators another 10 years to fix problems whose solutions were originally envisioned in 1999. Giving extensions in the past has not worked, so there is little faith that it will work this time around as well,” said Goenka.
As noted in CAT’s comments to the ministry, “This draft notification is not a ‘new’ notification but an attempt to regularise the non-compliance of the existing fly ash notifications.” The comments suggest that “existing power plants that are not in compliance with the existing fly ash notifications should be prosecuted under the Environment Protection Act” and that “no attempt should be made to regularise failures in compliance with the earlier fly ash notifications”.
A third addition to the rules, which some experts referred to as the most worrying, is a provision that exempts “stabilised” ash ponds from utilisation targets. “Legacy ash utilisation is not required where ash pond/dyke has stabilised and the reclamation has taken place with greenbelt/plantation. Concerned state pollution control board shall certify in this regard,” the draft rules stated.
“This is worrying because there is no scientific definition of what a ‘stabilised’ ash pond is. It is likely to encourage violators to simply procure certificates from the pollution control boards concerned without any third-party scrutiny. These new rules do not acknowledge that fly ash has already been dumped in extremely ecological sensitive areas in an extremely unscientific manner. It suggests that a few simple steps such as creating greenbelts will fix the problem, whereas we do not even have enough data to assess the scale of the damage, both social and ecological, in most places,” said Shweta Narayan, advisor with the Health Energy Initiative (HEI), who recently published a report documenting 17 major fly ash related accidents in India over the past year.
