When the massive coal-fired power plant next door to her home in New Delhi was firing at full blast, Bala Devi would pull her saree tight against her face to try and protect her lungs.
It was a futile gesture. Towered over by red-and-white striped smoke stacks, Devi’s house in a poor community of India’s capital is just too close to the sprawling plant.
“The coal dust got mixed in with the food,” said Devi, who regularly coughed up black phlegm in the mornings. Mountains of unused coal and a fly ash pond the size of 500 football fields made her neighborhood a particularly noxious part of the world’s most polluted mega-city. “We would shut our doors and we swept the floors,” she said. “But still we fell ill.”
