Abstract

Wetland is very important source of natural resources, upon which the rural economy depends. Wetlands provide many substantial benefits not only to local society, but also to the people, who live far away from wetlands. These benefits are mainly numerous services, flood control, groundwater recharging and pollution reduction. Naturally, from the point of view of economy as well as ecology, the significance of wetland and stakeholders’ participation for preserving the wetland is huge. The objective of the present paper is to evaluate the economic valuation of an important floodplain wetland in the lower Gangetic basin. The focus is extended to notice the status of different mouzas with respect to their economic structure through cluster analysis and to optimize the number of working population involved in different occupations in such a way that the per capita economic valuation of each mouza is maximized. In this study, the wetland related occupations are selected and with help of income estimation method, the economic valuation of every mouza is calculated. Minitab- 15 is applied to get a complete scenario of status of the mouzas in terms of their economic structure through the cluster analysis. However, the optimization problem boils down with the help of Matlab environment. The management options are also highlighted to conserve the wetland as well as to uplift the stakeholders’ livelihood. With the help of different analysis, the paper concludes that the majority of the population should go for farming followed by fishing and then other occupations.

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