ANNOUNCEMENTS
The Government of India proposed a first of its kind infrastructure and a development project in India- a River linking project between Madhya Pradesh (Ken River) and Uttar Pradesh (Betwa River) to solve the various issues in the Bundelkhand region. Any human interference disturbs the ecological balance of the earth and can lead to the degradation of the natural ecosystems around the globe. The ecosystem services are important and crucial for survival on this planet and hence become a necessity to estimate the various economic costs and benefits of these alterations in the ecosystem due to projects like the Ken Betwa River Interlinking project.
The central objective of the research that follows from the above is to analyze the overall feasibility of the project by identifying the net social costs and benefits from the project across selected stakeholders. It was met by using both primary data including questionnaires and secondary data. The methodology the study will follow is the Opportunity cost approach which will be used to capture the cost of conservation and the Benefit transfer approach to value ecosystem services related with the Tiger Reserve. It is found that the opportunity cost of this project is approximately Rs. 6,97,2,471 which is net revenue from agriculture for all seven villages. The project submerging a part of the tiger reserve would lead to an irreplaceable loss of direct use ecosystem services worth 0.84 billion rupees and indirect use services worth 57.15 billion rupees. The present discounted value is positive for most of the villages and negative for two. The result from the study shows that the research can capture the cost of conservation in terms of revenue forgone by utilizing opportunity cost method and is expected to help the concerned authorities on deciding whether the Ken Betwa interlinkage project will be feasible or not.
Keywords: river interlinkage, dam, environmental costs, submergence, agricultural revenue, opportunity cost
