The major health hazards from smoke and dust are due to microscopic fine particles present in smoke as well as in dust. These fine particles, which are microscopic in nature, can penetrate into human lungs and give rise to a range of health problems such as irritation in eyes, a runny nose, throat infection, and chronic cardiac and lung diseases. There is a need to device such mechanisms that can monitor smoke in thermal power plants for timely control of smoke that can pollute air and affects adversely the people living nearby the plants. In order to solve the problems of low accuracy of monitoring results and long monitoring time in conventional methods, a real-time smoke and dust monitoring system in thermal power plants is proposed, which makes use of modified genetic algorithm (GA). The collection and calibration of various monitoring parameters are accomplished through sampling control. The smoke and dust emission real-time monitoring subsystems are employed for the monitoring in an accurate manner. A dual-channel TCP/IP protocol is used between remote and local controlling modules for secure and speedy communication of the system. The generic GA is improved on the basis of the problem statement, and the linear programming model is used to avoid the defect of code duplication with genetic operations. The experimental results show that the proposed smoke and dust monitoring system can effectively improve the accuracy of the monitoring results and also reduce the time complexity by providing solutions in a faster manner. The significance of the proposed technique is to provide a reliable basis for the smoke and dust emission control of thermal power plants for safeguarding the human health.