Abstract
We think of the cleanup of water pollution in the Ganges river in India as a local public good and ask whether this cleanup ought to be decentralized or centralized. We depart from the existing literature on this subject in two important ways. First, we allow the heterogeneous spillovers from cleaning up water pollution to be positive or negative. Second, we focus on water pollution cleanup in three cities—Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi—through which the Ganges flows. Our model sheds light on two broad issues. First, we characterize efficient water pollution cleanup in the three cities, we describe how much water pollution is cleaned up under decentralization, we describe the set of cleanup amounts under decentralization, and we discuss why pollution cleanup under decentralization is unlikely to be efficient. Second, we focus on centralization. We derive the tax paid by the inhabitants of the three cities for pollution cleanup, the benefit to a city inhabitant from water pollution cleanup, how majority voting determines how much pollution is cleaned up when the spillovers from cleanup are uniform, and finally, we compare the amounts of pollution cleaned up with majority voting with the efficient pollution cleanup amounts.
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Notes
Go to https://www.bqprime.com/business/why-kanpurs-tanneries-are-at-the-centre-of-a-fight-to-save-the-ganga for additional details on this point. Accessed on 19 December 2023.
Go to https://mahileather.com/blogs/news/the-world-s-most-famous-leather-markets for a more detailed discussion of this point. Accessed on 19 December 2023.
See Wohl (2010) for more details on how these damaging impacts exacerbate the Ganges water pollution problem.
Go to https://www.indiawaterportal.org/articles/impacts-water-infrastructure-and-climate-change-hydrology-upper-ganges-river-basin for more details and for a quantitative discussion of this point. Accessed on 19 December 2023.
In addition to the papers mentioned in this paragraph, the Ganges has been studied from multiple perspectives by a variety of authors. Specifically, Salman and Uprety (1999) have analyzed what they call water politics in the context of the Ganges. Bhaduri and Barbier (2006, 2008) have analyzed transboundary water sharing involving Ganges water. Islam and Gnauck (2009) have analyzed threats to mangrove wetland ecosystems in the Ganges basin. Kedzior (2017) has analyzed environmental awareness and participation in Ganges water quality policy in India, and Lee and Mitchell (2019) have analyzed water related conflicts with reference to the Ganges basin. More generally, sustainability considerations, broadly construed, in the context of rivers have been studied by Ferrer et al. (2022), Xu et al. (2022), and Anh et al. (2022).
Decentralized provision means that each city independently determines whether to provide the efficient amount of pollution cleanup. In contrast, centralized provision means that a central authority in the aggregate economy of three cities—such as the Uttar Pradesh state government—determines whether the efficient amount of pollution cleanup will be provided in each of the three cities under consideration.
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A.B. was responsible for conceptualizing the analysis, constructing and analyzing the model, and for writing the first draft of the submitted paper. H.B. was responsible for consulting with A.B. about the modeling, for editing and rewriting portions of the first draft, and for checking some of the mathematics.
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The authors declare that no funding of any kind was received to conduct this study. In addition, the authors declare that they have no financial or other conflicts of interest to report in connection with the writing of this paper. Finally, the first author (Batabyal) has been selected to be an Area Editor of Networks and Spatial Economics from January 1, 2024.
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The first author (Batabyal) will be an Area Editor of this journal from January 1, 2024.
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Batabyal, A., Beladi, H. Decentralized vs. Centralized Water Pollution Cleanup in the Ganges in a Model with Three Cities. Netw Spat Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-024-09620-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-024-09620-8