India's first waste-to-energy plant to start operations in July

India's first waste-to-energy plant,  will start operations from July.

The Timarpur Okhla Municipal Solid Waste Management plant is a private-public partnership project of the the Jindal ITF Ecoplis and Municipal Corporation of Delhi.

The project is spread over a two-acre landfill in Okhla in south Delhi. About 70 percent of the construction is complete.

Once completed, the plant will produce 16 MW of electricity, enough to serve six lakh homes, from about 2,050 tonnes of solid waste, which is 25 percent of the waste generated in Delhi every day.

While touted as an answer to the waste and electricity woes of the capital, people living near the site are up in arms over the Rs.200 crore project's high environmental and health costs.

Residents of Jamia Nagar, Okhla, Jasola, Sukhdev Vihar, New Friends Colony and other nearby areas are worried that the fumes released through the chimneys will contain poisonous chemicals, and harm both environment and human health.

The residents had filed a public interest litigation in the Delhi High Court against the project in 2009. Counsel for the residents K.K. Rohatgi said the plant is illegal.

'There is no legality to run this kind of plant in residential areas. We want the construction of the plant to stop immediately,' Rohtagi told Indo Asian News Service. .

But Allard M. Nooy, CEO of Jindal ITF Ecopolis, says the plant poses no danger to the residents and the environment.

'There is no question of health hazard. We are responsible to the community as well as our reputation as citizens. To control air pollution, we have installed the best equipment available in the world and half the total project amount is being spent to control pollution,' Nooy told IANS.

Nooy says this project is the first commercial waste-to-energy facility in India, and is similar to projects in countries kile the US, Britain and France.