The Willingness to Pay for Improving Drinking water supply in Tamil Nadu: A Case study of tannery water pollution in Vellore District

Tannery pollution and the resulting health impacts are a worldwide problem. Due to the cheap labour availability and tax pollution regulation leather tanning has become a popular export earning industry in countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Given its huge potential for export earnings and local economic livelihood especially for poor households, its adverse health impacts seem to have been ignored. Also thus far there has been no systematic economic valuation study in India. This also attempts to estimate the health cost of this industry to people including those very households that have made leather tanning their livelihood. Therefore the present research study aims to examine economic valuation of human health impact of the pollution from the tannery industry in Vellore district, using the Willingness to Pay method. Vellore district in Tamil Nadu state of India is purposively selected because of its larger number of tanneries.