U.S. Delegation Could Help India Preserve Taj Mahal : Environment: Energy secretary targets pollutants imperiling the monument and cities worldwide. Private business deals OKd.

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

July 14, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

AGRA, India — Swifts flitted about the minarets Wednesday as the setting sun tinted the pale white marble of the world’s most celebrated monument to eternal love, the Taj Mahal, a ruddy orange.

For people around the globe, the architectural wonder built three centuries ago by an emperor to house the tomb of his beloved is a poem in stone to love and loss. Officials for the U.S. Department of Energy, however, saw another significance.

“The Taj is a monument to the need for sustainable energy,” one said.

This week, Energy Secretary Hazel R. O’Leary visited the Taj Mahal as she led what she called “the largest business delegation ever to leave Washington, D.C., and the first in the history of our nation to focus on sustainable development.”

Its white marble surface menaced by high-level air pollution and the gritty industrial zones that have sprouted around it, the Taj, O’Leary said after a guided tour, now serves as a “canary in a coal mine,” warning the world at large of its environmental problems.

As a result of weekend talks with Kamal Nath, India’s environmental minister, O’Leary said India and the United States agreed to search together for cleaner energy sources that could be used in Agra, a city of more than 1 million people, as well as other possible jobs for its populace that would cut air pollution.

“If we think about what sustainable development means, then what better focus for the world, not just our two countries, than to wrestle with the issue of how we preserve this wonderful monument,” O’Leary said as she sat on a bench in the Taj’s quiet garden.

Her visit was intended to build on the momentum achieved by Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao’s May 19 talks at the White House with President Clinton. The large business contingent was proof the Americans meant to “do deals,” O’Leary assured her hosts.

On Wednesday, in New Delhi 120 miles north of here, U.S. business representatives signed 11 new private-sector ventures with Indian partners involving energy projects as diverse as construction of a $240-million, gas-fired 200 megawatt power plant in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh; use of sugar cane waste to generate electricity; transfer of U.S. coal-washing technology to treat high-ash Indian coal, and manufacture of low-cost solar batteries in Madras to power rural telephones and lanterns.

“It means jobs, and high-quality jobs, for workers in the United States and India, and in the long run, it also means an opportunity to suppress pollution throughout the world,” O’Leary said after the signing ceremony of accords she predicted would be worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” in new business.

For India, where insufficient electricity often proves a choke point to faster or uniform development, the diverse sources of power should boost the government drive to build a more modern, prosperous economy.

The Taj was built between 1631 and 1653 by the grief-stricken Mogul Emperor Shahjahan for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Although debate continues on just how badly the tomb has been damaged and the precise source, noxious fumes, chemical waste and thousands of vehicles plying Agra’s overtaxed roads are blamed by many.

Three hundred glass factories and foundries in this city and its environs reportedly burn more than 10,000 tons of hard coke every day, releasing large quantities of sulfur dioxide. An oil refinery on the Delhi-Agra highway is also a major polluter. One expert at Agra University estimated that a square inch of the Taj turns yellow every day.

A survey this year by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute said that, if greater pollution abatement measures are not introduced immediately, a quarter of the Taj will be yellowed by 1997. Cracks have also appeared in places.

O’Leary said that, although one Indo-U.S. study has been done on how to ease environmental pressures on the Taj, she and Nath agreed another was needed to coordinate plans by the state of Uttar Pradesh, where Agra is located, the ministries of environment and tourism and other agencies.

“After the study, we can then make a decision about funding,” including from U.S. sources, O’Leary said.

Asked why American money should be spent on an Indian monument, O’Leary said the same solutions developed to protect or restore the Taj could be used to refurbish aging U.S. cities.

“The U.S. taxpayer has a great deal to do with the Taj Mahal,” O’Leary said. “Things that enrich the soul, no matter where they exist, need to be preserved. Most importantly, all issues involving the environment are global issues. And in the United States, the American public clearly understands that.”