Chapter 10: People’s Awareness on Improvement in Environmental Quality in the Industrial Belts of West Bengal: An Assessment Through Contingent Valuation Method

We all understand the everlasting harmful effects of pollution. A larger proportion of this pollution gets generated from industrial units due to use of backward technologies along with intentional or unintentional economic policies that has allowed such industries to grow over the years. Many of these industries are poor, in many cases, they do not have the ability to install abatement technologies or use emission-free green technologies for their huge cost. In many cases, they do not do so intentionally just to enjoy higher profit and due to faulty planning. But, the pollution generated from such industries makes us all suffer, especially those who live in those industrial areas. They are more exposed to the emission directly. Again, growing consensus among people about pollution has increased the consumption of eco-friendly, less-polluting products which could have a wide-ranging impact on the production techniques and can force the producers to change their production techniques, In this chapter, by applying contingent valuation method (CVM), the authors have looked to capture how far people of two very renowned industrial belts in West Bengal, Howrah and Barrackpore, are willing to contribute to the reduction of such emission level by consuming eco-friendly products and paying the emitting producers to force them to adopt pollution-free technology. The authors have applied close-ended dichotomous choice (DC) bidding technique by using logit regression and have also applied open-ended bidding process by using ordinary least square (OLS) method. In both cases, the authors have found the mean willingness to pay (WTP) is quite high which shows that people are very much willing to move towards using eco-friendly goods and technologies.