Growing Pollution Clouds Future of Famed Taj Mahal : India: The marble structure is threatened by industrial smoke and gases despite cleanups and efforts at control.

In a narrow lane choked with dust and fumes not far from the most remarkable marble tomb ever built, Hari Om Gupta’s desk is piled high with the mounting evidence of an impending cultural disaster.

They are like daily damage assessments from the war front in India’s painful movement from its rich, ancient past toward a more modern, prosperous future. And the symbolic battlefield for the struggle, its evidence filling every inch of Gupta’s desk and tens of thousands of hours of other scientists’ time, could not be more apt.

It is nothing less than India’s greatest historic treasure: the Taj Mahal.

The daily log sheets and computer printouts cluttering Gupta’s desk this week at the tiny headquarters of the Archeological Survey of India’s Air Pollution Control Laboratory in Agra were, in fact, detailed readings of the air now threatening to erode the exquisite 17th-Century shrine. They show soaring concentrations of sulfur dioxide, suspended particulates, carbon monoxide, heavy-metal dust and the occasional acid rain that continue to bombard the famous structure.

They were written in the spectrographic code of micrograms and parts per million, the minute-by-minute output of half a dozen sophisticated monitors that have been placed strategically atop the fading pearl dome of the Taj Mahal--unseen by the army of tourists who descend on Agra each day.

The data represent the latest evidence in India’s epic struggle to save the Taj Mahal, a technological battle between a combine of industrialists and politicians and a loosely knit network of environmentalists and scientists.

As the chief chemist at the air pollution laboratory, Gupta is both translator and prognosticator of the daily battlefield reports from the famous tomb built by the Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan between 1630 and 1648. And as he pored over the latest reports in his office, Gupta’s conclusion hardly echoed the optimism of recent Indian government proclamations that the Taj, so far, is free from pollution decay.

“If we continue to allow the entry of pollutants into the air around Agra, definitely, the Taj is in danger,” Gupta said this week, 13 years after his laboratory was created to help save the monument from the industrial revolution exploding around it.

Despite a series of programs that have spent millions of dollars to clean and restore the Taj and a flurry of legal efforts to reduce the pollutants in Agra’s air, Gupta said the issue is no longer whether Agra’s air has eaten away at the Taj. The fact is, he said, that ultimately it will. “And, according to the data so far with us, we can say that definitely (the pollution) is increasing,” he added.

The Taj Mahal, considered one of the world’s most beautiful structures, is a monument to a woman. It was ordered built by Jahan after his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died in 1629 while delivering their 14th child. The white marble tomb, on the Yamuna River, took 22 years and the work of thousands of men to construct.

At the heart of the modern threat to the Taj is a dizzying array of industrial and environmental nightmares, all located within 20 miles of the monument. They are part of the same post-independence rush to modernize that has left New Delhi with what one study this week ranked as the world’s fourth-most-polluted air.

In the Agra area alone, there are 210 aging iron foundries constantly spewing gray-brown clouds of nitrous oxide. There are the smokestacks of a sprawling, coal-fired oil refinery that burn around the clock, pouring thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide into the air. There is an open-air crematory just a few hundred feet from the Taj that releases a steady black cloud of carbon, which Gupta cited as an immediate menace to the shrine’s once-pristine marble.

And the latest threat: A planned 250-megawatt thermal power plant, the pet project of several of the region’s powerful politicians, that environmentalists say will contribute an additional 100 tons of sulfur dioxide to the air each day if it wins government approval.

It was the huge oil refinery project--proposed in 1973 and commissioned eight years later in the industrial city of Mathura, near Agra--that first focused international attention on the growing threat to the Taj from India’s helter-skelter industrialization.

Superficial examinations at the time revealed tiny but spreading, pockmarks in the Taj’s marble facade. The stone was graying and yellowing in spots. Cracks were appearing. And all of it was soon attributed to the massive pollutants in Agra’s air.

“I saw the Taj in October, 1975, after 11 years and noticed that it didn’t look as shining white as it always did,” Indian environmentalist Som N. Chib wrote in a 1978 article entitled “The Taj Mahal: Act Before It Is Too Late.”

“There seemed to be a conspiracy of silence on this question,” he said. “No one in the government wanted to admit that indeed there had been some deterioration.”

Concluding that the damage was the work of industrial air pollution from hundreds of unregulated and poorly designed plants and factories like the planned Mathura refinery, Chib then suggested that the Taj would ultimately be ruined beyond repair if nothing was done to stop the deterioration, adding: “The only solution is to stop the construction of the oil refinery and build it elsewhere.”

The government ordered an exhaustive environmental study of the planned refinery that concluded that its sulfur dioxide emissions represented “contributions to the (poor) air quality of the zone that will be considerably high.” And dozens of broader studies were begun--involving the installation of spectrometers, anemometers (wind gauges) and the other sophisticated machinery hidden atop the Taj that still report daily to Gupta’s air pollution office--in an effort to measure the threat.

Amid mounting evidence that Agra’s air was indeed heavily polluted, the government boldly announced that it was ordering the city’s iron foundries to move out. It launched an intensive chemical-testing program to develop a cleaning process for the Taj, a system that has now been used on three of the tomb’s four towering facades. And government scientists brought in experts from Europe and the United States to advise them on ways to treat the marble to prevent deterioration.

But today, the danger is greater than ever for the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, whose name means “Jewel of the Palace.”

Not a single one of the iron foundries has moved out of town despite the decade-old order, and just two of the 210 smoke-belching foundries have installed pollution-control devices despite orders that all must do so this year.

The Mathura oil refinery continues to operate at full capacity, its flaming smokestacks and billowing black smoke visible for miles around. The number of polluting vehicles nearby, another major source of pollutants threatening the Taj, has more than doubled in those same 10 years, mirroring Agra’s soaring population, which has risen from 750,000 to nearly 2 million during the same period.

And in a radical turnabout from the scare headlines of more than a decade ago, the Indian media now reflect a mood of complacency and denial, the mark of a growing middle class far more concerned with the megawatts of progress than the preservation of its past.

“An increasing number of people in Agra see the Taj Mahal not as a wonder of the world but as a hindrance to progress and better living,” declared a recent article in the Times of India.

“The Taj Mahal never gave us our bread,” the paper quoted a local tour operator as saying. “What right does it have to snatch our living away? Take away the Taj, remove it, dismantle it, but please let us live.”

The emotion is not an isolated one. During a visit this week to the famous shrine 125 miles south of New Delhi, a reporter found several guides and taxi drivers who all insisted that there had never been any truth to the pollution threat.

“No one has been able to say authoritatively how much effect the pollution has had on this monument,” said Prem Narayan Raizada, the 59-year-old dean of the tour guides at the Taj.

“In my way of thinking, though, the Taj has not changed much,” said Raizada, a white-haired expert on the legends of the shrine who has escorted kings and presidents past its thousands of luminescent jeweled inlays and Koranic inscriptions. “There is a definite change in the color of the marble from when I first saw it, but that change is very automatic when you take the marble out of the quarry.”

Twenty miles or so to the north, at the sprawling and smoky Singhal Iron Foundry on the Grand Trunk Road toward Delhi, can be found one of the established sources of Agra’s air pollution.

“What are you saying?” shouted Om Prakash Aggarwal, the 65-year-old foundry owner, when asked whether he believes his operation is contributing to the decay of the Taj Mahal. “We are 45 kilometers from the Taj Mahal, and the pollution exhaust from here will fall to the ground long before it reaches there.”

Aggarwal’s explanation provided some insight into the system that has governed India’s ill-fated efforts to reduce the airborne onslaught on the Taj.

“Of course we feel responsible for curbing pollution,” he said, “but the problem is, we don’t have the money for it, and there’s been a slump in the iron market . . . “

He explained that his foundry cannot afford the $12,000 pollution-control device that the government has ordered all the foundries to install.

“We’re demanding that the government subsidize 50% of the cost of these devices and give us loans for the other 50%,” Aggarwal said.

“The problem is, the government is crying about pollution, giving laws and orders, but it’s doing nothing to enforce them. And really, no one cares.”