INDIA IN THE 21st CENTURY:LOOKING BEYOND A GROWING
ECONOMY
Shreekant Gupta
Delhi School of EconomicsUniversity of Delhi
March 26, [email protected]
OUTLINE
• Importance of the natural resource base
• Poverty and the environment: a 2-way street?
• Quantifying the linkages
• Mainstreaming the environment into poverty alleviation
Importance of the natural resource base
• “Poor countries are for the most part biomass-based subsistence economies, in that their rural folk eke out a living from products obtained directly from plant and animals" (Dasgupta & Mäler, Handbook of Development Economics, 1995, p. 2373)
• “…tackling environmental degradation is an integral part of lasting and effective poverty reduction.” (World Bank, DfID, UNDP, EC, 2002)
Importance of the natural resource base: practice
• Village Sukhomajri, Panchkula distt., Haryana– sustainable development through Chakriya Vikas
Pranali (P.R. Mishra) in the mid-1970s—regeneration & conservation of forests and fodder by and for the community
• Other examples of collective action to regenerate natural resources and its benefits--Ralegaon Siddhi (Maharashtra), Seed and Alwar (Rajasthan)
Some specific examples• Water• Energy (fuelwood, dung)• Fodder for cattle – direct & through
grazing• Timber (agricultural implements, housing)• Forest products (mahua flowers, tendu
leaves, etc.)• Mitigate income inequalities, provide
nutrition, generate employment
Examples of environmental goods and services in a primitive economy
• Wild foods (vegetables, animals, fish, insects, mice, birds), wild goods (gum, soap, oils, resins, dyes), wild medicines
• Multiple uses of wood (timber, firewood, agricultural implements, furniture, utensils, musical instruments, hunting implements, rope from bark
• Grass, reeds, rushes, canes and leaves (thatching, mats, baskets, leaf litter—fertilizer)
• Other (pottery clay, termite mounds—fertilizer, fodder, water)
Poverty and the environment:two-way relationship
• Common wisdom – poverty causes environmental degradation
• Neglected link – environmental degradation causes poverty
PovertyEnvironmental
Degradation
At the same time….• … lack of understanding of the effect of natural
resource degradation on household incomes…
and
• … a lack of studies that quantify this effect…
implies
• failure to recognize potential of improved natural resource management as a policy tool to alleviate poverty
• do not know who loses (gains) from natural resource degradation (regeneration)
Public assets vs. private assets
• Environmental goods and services (common-pool natural resources) in effect serve as a public asset for rural poor…
• substitute for private assets (land, livestock, farm capital, human capital, financial wealth) that the rural poor lack
• If so, can natural resource management form the basis of poverty alleviation policies?
Conceptualising the poverty- environment linkage
• Use of natural resources
• Dependence on natural resources
Quantifying the linkages• Jodha (1986), 502 households in 21 Indian
villages, dependence on common-pool natural resources decreases with income:– poor households 9-26% of income from CPRs– (relatively) rich households 1-4% of income from
CPRs
• Reddy and Chakravarty (1999), 232 households in 12 Himalayan villages, similarly find dependence on resources decreases from 23% for the poor to 4% for the rich
Quantifying the linkages (contd.)• Cavendish (2000), 197 households in 29
villages in Zimbabwe, finds much higher rates of dependency with poor households deriving as much as 40% of their incomes from natural resources and the rich deriving about 30%, but use of natural resources increases with income
• On the other hand, Adhikari (2003), 330 households in 8 “forest user groups” in Nepal, finds dependence increases with income, from 14% for the poor to 22% for the rich
Quantifying the linkages (contd.)
• All four studies also examine the relationship between income and the absolute level of resource use, but find no consistent trend: Jodha finds that use, along with dependence, decreases with income, Reddy and Chakravarty find an initial slight increase followed by a decrease, and Cavendish and Adhikari find an increase throughout
Research objective: Jhabua study
• Understand how use of and dependence on natural resources varies with household income
• None of the previous studies looks at who wins from regeneration or loses from degradation. We focus on this as well
Other research objectives(work in progress)
• Estimate marginal contribution of natural resource stocks to household incomes, or their shadow values – measures impact of policy initiatives to increase these stocks
• Effects of natural resource availability on household division of labor (esp. women’s time allocation decisions)
Target audience• Policy makers – district level (Collector,
Additional Collector, forest officials)
• Policy makers – state-level (rural development department, forest department, Chief Minister’s secretariat)
• Policy makers – federal level (Planning Commission, Ministry of Rural Dev., Ministry of Environment and Forests)
• NGOs – district, state, national (CSE)
Jhabua• Land distribution – 54% agricultural, 19%
forest, 27% wasteland.• Only 49% of men and 26% of women literate.• Life expectancy 51 years.• HDI 0.356 – lowest of 48 districts in M.P.• Agriculture – main occupation (employs >90%
of work force) – primarily rain-fed.• Agricultural income supplemented with
income from livestock rearing and forest products (fuelwood, tendu leaves, mahua flowers/seeds).
Research site
Jhabua
Jhabua
Sampling procedure
• Two stage sampling design• First stage -- stratified random
sample of villages (ensure cross-section variablility in natural resource stocks)
• Second stage -- stratified random sample of households (landless, small and other)
Data collection and quality
• Household-level and village-level data from 60 villages and 535 households for June 2000-May 2001
• Tests for quality and consistency at various levels (visual check by Field Supervisor, internal consistency check during data entry)
• Double entry of all household and village data
Data entry and validationObjective—to generate a high quality,error free, internally consistent dataset
Step 1 – visual check by field supervisor(skip codes, incomplete/missed
entries)Step 2 – data entry in field (Excel spreadsheets)Step 3 – survey check programStep 4 – check by PIs
Step 5 – field researchers resolve queries
Step 6 – double data entry
Field Research Team
Field Research Team
Field Research Team
Income categories: Jhabua• Agriculture
• Livestock rearing
• Common pool resource (CPR) collection
• Household enterprise
• Wage employment
• Financial transactions (borrowing, lending)
• Transfers (state, NGOs, relatives, friends)
Main CPRs collected: Jhabua
• wood for fuel
• wood for construction
• fodder
• mahua flowers
• mahua seeds
• tendu leaves
• dung
Natural resource dependence, biomass, and total income (whole sample)
Dependence, Biomass & Total Income (Collecting Households)
Relationship between Use, Biomass, and Total Income for Whole Sample
Mainstreaming the environment into poverty alleviation
• Need to go beyond cliches: Gross Nature Product vs. Gross National Product (Approach Paper 10th Five Year Plan, 2001)
• Move outside conceptualising and implementing poverty alleviation and natural resource management in separate boxes
Conclusions• “green” policies that increase biomass
availability may benefit the non-poor as well as the poor
• Thus, design issues and implementation are important to ensure equitable distribution of benefits
• Need to mainstream natural resource management into poverty alleviation and take a holistic approach (education, employment generation, environmental regeneration)