Estimating Impacts and Cost of Air Pollution Due to Road Infrastructure Projects

Abstract

Economic activities in the world are growing at an enormous pace and thus it is required to connect with the areas never touched before, leading to high-scale infrastructure development. This is a good thing from a normal human perspective as it is giving an opportunity to the lower income people to earn the bread on their own but this development has its own consequences. With an objective to improve the connectivity between two points, the infrastructure projects are awarded without significant consideration towards environment. This study presents an estimate of damage produced by vehicle operations in terms of monetary values. This gives an opportunity to the Indian infrastructure planners to take environmental damage cost into account for selecting a suitable alignment between two nodes, which is not a common practice in India. The study included a two-fold objective to quantify the emissions from vehicles of typical national highway traffic in terms of capital cost and to compare the changes in the cost associated with the emissions by shifting vehicle operation from BS IV to BS VI. In order to achieve the objectives, secondary data from an alignment of Maharashtra and Karnataka was utilized. The study adopts a methodology of finding out the difference in the cost between BS IV and BS VI vehicular operation based on standard emission norms and unit costs of pollutants suggested by researchers around the globe. This gives us an approximate estimate of how much damage is posed to the environment and health effects on nearby residents or users of the link by operating a vehicle for one km. Data collected from various reports give an indication of the total overhead cost to upgrade the fuel technology and vehicles as per BS VI norms.