Sixty per cent of India’s industrial particulate matter is generated by fossil fuel based power plants. This makes India’s 11 cities among the 20 most polluted cities in the world.

New Delhi (Sputnik) — In a significant move to curb carbon emission in the next five years, India has announced an ambitious target to phase out all thermal power plants older than 25 years.

"The plants would be replaced energy-efficient super critical ones in about five years with an investment of around $ 7.55 billion," says Piyush Goyal, India's Minister for Power.

NTPC, India's largest power generator, has given in-principal approval to replace around 11,000 MW of its old, inefficient thermal power plants. NTPC has over 47 gigawatts of generating capacity mostly fired by fossil fuels.

Sources told Sputnik that NTPC has more than 24,000 MW of coal capacity in different stages of construction mostly based on super critical energy efficient technology.

India has pledged before United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change plans to achieve 40 per cent cumulative electric power capacity from non-fossil fuel based energy resources by 2030.

To measure up to its projections, India is scaling up the target of renewable energy capacity to 175 GW by the year 2022 which includes 100 GW from solar, 60 GW from wind, 10 GW from bio-power and 5 GW from small hydro-power.

Apart from this, India aggressively acquiring natural gas assets across the world so that share of gas in the country's energy basket increased to 15 per cent from the present 6.5 per cent.