ANNOUNCEMENTS
The Aravalli Biodiversity Park (ABP) in Gurgaon is an urban forest of NCR which has around 300 native plant species and is a habitat for around 196 migrant bird species. The park is crucial for the existence of various biodiversity and ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, air pollution sink, groundwater recharge, habitat for migrant species. It is a home for a number of endangered species. There has been a proposal from National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) of building a new road connecting NH8, NH 236 (MG Road) and Faridabad Road passing 1.5 Km through the Aravalli Park to reduce congestion on NH8 at Signature Tower, IIFCO Chowk and Rajeev Chowk. It will decongest 26 Km long section of NH8 between Ambience Mall and NSG Gate and will allow traffic from MG Road to bypass entire Gurgaon. The main objective of the study is to ascertain cost-minimizing alternatives of the construction of highway through ABP. More precisely, the study addressed the following research question “Does economic and ecological costs from construction of a highway outweigh the costs of not having the highway through Aravalli Biodiversity Park?”
We estimated the economic and ecological costs from the construction of highway and compared it with the no highway case. In conceptual terms, opportunity cost approach was followed for economic ones, which is to find out the additional costs incurred by the economic agents in either case to avail the next best alternative. The data regarding the ecological costs were collected through semi-structured questionnaire in the form of personal interviews. The analysis was carried out by looking from the cost-effectiveness approach. The three alternatives of the project- one where highway construction takes place (either through the surface or tunnel) and the other without any construction were considered and the relevant costs from these three scenarios were captured to arrive at the cost-minimizing alternative. The findings from the study were that the research was able to capture the different costs related to all possible options of construction of highway across different stakeholders. The cost-effectiveness analysis results show that the least cost alternative turns out to be the case when highway passes through an underpass.
Key Words: - biodiversity park, highway, opportunity cost, cost-effectiveness analysis, ABP.
