Sayed Musawwir Ali, an official with Delhi’s environment department and a member of its pollution control committee, said the government was following the action plan “100 percent” but declined to confirm specific policies.

“Whatever is written in the plan we are doing,” he said.

Since the public increasingly views air pollution as one of India’s most intractable and urgent problems, a tension has grown between the country’s need to provide clean air for its citizens and the need to provide power to the nearly 300 million residents who live without electricity.

The Badarpur plant was reopened partly in anticipation of surplus power demand in Delhi in the summer, when temperatures reach a scorching 120 degrees and fans, coolers, and air-conditioners work overtime. It was closed in November in an effort to improve air quality.

But an analysis by Greenpeace India found that Delhi has adequate supply to meet its needs, and the power provided by the Badarpur plant is more expensive than energy that could be bought from the central grid. Even if Badarpur needed to reopen, said Sunil Dahiya, who wrote the report, it would not need to be used until June.

The government defended the reopening of the plant as being consistent with the action plan.

Mr. Ali said that when pollution conditions have become bad, the plant has been directed to stop operations temporarily.

He said that the plant was meeting emissions standards and that the Environmental Pollution Control Authority had said that the goal would be the ultimate closing of the plant in 2018. The Center for Science and the Environment, based in Delhi, found the Badarpur plant to be one of the country’s most polluting in 2015.

Some experts say that the contribution of the Badarpur plant to Delhi’s air pollution is limited, even when it is running at capacity, and that a more efficient way to ensure better air would be to carry out the national emissions standards for thermal power plants that the Environment Ministry passed in December 2015, and are scheduled to take effect next December.