istricts) 
ure & 
onomic 
300k of 
gladesh 
anning, 
istry of 
es. In : 
Steven, 
pp. 19 
tions in 
Remote 
ititative 
289. 
BL. 
Remote 
"'W era. 
,. 1997. 
acreage 
tuation. 
Krishna 
S KR, 
.. 1996. 
Current 
V. K., 
iigrahy, 
ripathy, 
Sudha, 
tion in 
port on 
1. SAC 
(1998- 
| data. 
Remote 
'ademic 
IAPRS & SIS, Vol.34, Part 7, "Resource and Environmental Monitoring", Hyderabad, India, 2002 
  
INCIDENCE OF POVERTY, NATURAL RESOURCES DEGRADATION AND 
ECONOMIC POLICIES & INTERVENTIONS: A STUDY BASED ON WASTELAND 
MAPPING 
S K Srivastava *, S Bandyopadhyay, H C Meena Rani, V S Hegde and V Jayaraman 
Earth Observations System (EOS) Programme Office 
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) 
Bangalore 5600 94, INDIA - (sanjay G'isro.org) 
KEY WORDS: Incidence of Poverty, Wastelands, Food Insecurity, Spatial Integration, Capital and Labour flow, Institutional 
Interventions, etc. 
ABSTRACT : 
It is obvious to imagine the co-existence of poverty and natural resources degradation in the developing countries. Economic policies 
and institutional interventions, aims at achieving equitable growth and substantial poverty reduction, perturbs this relationship, and 
thus require evaluating their roles in terms of altering labour & capital flows and creating the alternate livelihood systems. Is the 
developments taking place in rural infrastructure, education etc, as the result of various policies & interventions, allow the economic 
and spatial integration of poor and marginalized to market forces to happen, open up several new marginal income earning 
opportunities in the informal sector of economy and reduces their dependence on natural resource base for livelihoods? To address 
such issues need extensive data on natural resources degradation vis-à-vis the various aspects related to socio-economic development 
indicators. Nationwide wasteland mapping project, carried out by National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), provides insights into 
the problems related to natural resources degradation. Using these maps and statistics therein, in conjunction with relevant socio- 
economic indicators, the paper brings out the real dynamics of relationship between the incidence of poverty and natural resources 
degradation in the different States of India, representing the diverse ecosystems as well as different economic & social policy 
regimes and institutional interventions. Looking beyond the wasteland mapping, the study examines how macro-economic variables 
could determine the dynamics of poverty and natural resources degradation relationship in rural India. 
1.0 INTRODUCTION 
The countries of Asia and the Pacific region accounts for nearly 
two-thirds of the chronically poor and undernourished in the 
world. FAO estimates indicate that, by 2010, Asia will still 
account for about one-half of the world's malnourished 
population (FAO 2000). In Asia, poverty has mainly been rural 
phenomenon and nearly three-fourth of the poor live in rural 
areas, with large majority of them dependent on natural 
resources for employment and income. South Asia, which had a 
poverty incidence of 43 percent (or about 520 million people), 
contributed about 40 percent of the world's poor. Development 
of natural resources thus offers a potentially enormous means 
of poverty reduction. 
In developing countries poverty and environmental 
deterioration are often viable in proximity to each other, and 
have led many to infer that a two-way causality exists between 
human and environmental degradation. Environmental 
degradation usually occurs when production and consumption 
activities of growing populations irreversibly weaken nature's 
recycling capabilities. These economic activities are also 
attributed to the development of markets, the advent of modern 
technology, and the spatial integration of inaccessible areas to 
market systems. In many developing countries, however, 
environmental degradation such as soil erosion, deforestation 
and pollution are most visible around poor settlements, leading 
some policy makers to highlight the direct links between 
poverty and the environment. 
One has to recognize that both poverty and the environment are 
descriptions of states of human and natural resource attributes 
2 
and cannot be reduced to simple one-dimensional cause-effect 
relationships. Apart from conceptual difficulties in modeling 
linkages, another handicap has been the absence of adequate or 
reliable data sets on poverty and environment characteristics. 
The challenge for operational research is exploring how 
circumstantial evidence and inductive logic can be used to 
explain the nature of interactions between the two states. Based 
on nationwide wasteland statistics vis-à-vis state & district wise 
poverty estimates available with the concerned agencies, this 
study is one such attempt, and evaluates the incidence of 
poverty with the backdrop of natural resources degradation and 
role of institutional interventions with illustrations from India. 
2.0 NATURAL RESOURCES DEGRADATION 
ESTIMATES: WASTELAND MAPPING 
In the recent years, there has been grówing needs by planners, 
to know spatially the regions with the co-existence of poverty 
and environmental degradation, their precise distributions and 
the impact of various poverty alleviation measures vis-à-vis 
environmental management. It is in this context, the importance 
of satellite remote sensing and Geographical Information 
System (GIS) in providing such information is well 
documented (Srivastava et al 2002). 
In India, for targeting environmentally degraded lands to 
initiate poverty alleviation programme, at the behest of