KNOWING THE LINKAGES BETWEEN POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENT FROM VILLAGE ECONOMY OF BIHAR

摘要

It is popular among policy makers in the development field to claim that poverty leads to environmental degradation. The relationship between environmental quality and poverty is most obvious at the local level, especially in places where institutions and people are least able to cope and where resources are scarce. The poor live in unhealthy surroundings, a fact that is both a cause and effect of their poverty. Cooking can be a lethal activity among the poor. Over 70 per cent of fresh water sources are contaminated or degraded. The connection between rural poverty and the state of the local natural-resource base should be self-evident. It is also possible to argue that there is another link between natural resources and poverty: poverty contributes to the degradation of natural resources. This possible link from poverty to resource degradation is not so well established as the link from resource degradation to poverty. However, to the extent that it does apply, it strengthens the poverty-based argument for policies to reduce resource degradation, because the alleviation of poverty through improvement in natural resources will benefit from the positive feedback from reduced poverty to further resource improvement.