Cost-benefit analysis of shale development in India: A best-worst method based MCDM approach

India has recently started shale exploration in fifty blocks of the country. The shale reserves are exploited by hydraulic fracturing. Most of the shale reserve regions are well-cultivated land for farming. Hydraulic fracturing technology requires a massive amount of water and land, making it controversial in a highly populated country like India. In this work, the identification of consequences as cost and benefit due to the development of shale production has been carried out. In the existing literature, we have not found any work in the context of India concerning the identification and prioritization of cost and benefit factors due to shale production. This paper incorporates the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of shale development to assess its overall viability. A total of 24 factors (12 costs and 12 benefits) are identified based on an exhaustive literature review. Furthermore, these factors are evaluated and ranked using a multi-criteria decision-making method, i.e., the Best-Worst method. A priority-based taxonomy of factors and their respective categories with mapping to their individual local and global weights has also been presented. It has been found that economic benefit is the highly ranked category followed by environmental and social benefit, whereas in cost, the social cost is more important to emphasize, followed by environmental and economic cost. Among cost factors, "the disturbance of local ecosystem along with local communities" and among benefits "reduction of oil import bill" are the most critical factors. The "generation of high salaried jobs" and "high drilling cost" is the least important benefit and cost factor, respectively. The obtained results will help policymakers, researchers, industrialists, nongovernmental organizations, etc., for better decision-making. The obtained results would also be of interest to those countries that are considering shale development. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).