47% of the GDP of the poor comes from natural resources: UN report

Around 47% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of India's rural poor comes from natural resources, a United Nations report said, a day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh emphasized on importance of the "GDP of the Poor".

Updated on: Oct 18, 2012, 19:13:30 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Around 47% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of India's rural poor comes from natural resources, a United Nations report said, a day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh emphasized on importance of the "GDP of the Poor".

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in an analysis of income of 352 million poor Indians said that 47% of their GDP comes from use of natural resources such as harvesting of forest produce, collecting medicinal herbs from forests and fisheries.

"Conventional GDP is not relevant to a poor person as it does not benefit them as much as the richer guys," said Pavan Sukhdev, UNEP's Goodwill Ambassador, while speaking on relevance of biodiversity for livelihood of a poor person. "The analysis is based on National Sample Survey data."

India has about 380 million poor, half of whom are dependent on ecosystem services for daily sustainability. Industralisation in the last two decades has witnessed loss of biodiversity resources for the poor, thereby affecting their livelihood, several testimonies released at the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) here have showed.

"Biodiversity based livelihood options form the basis of rural survival. Living at the periphery of subsistence, the poor are the most at risk from biodiversity loss," PM Singh said, while inaugurating the high level segment of CBD on Tuesday.

An environment ministry statement on last Friday said India has allowed destruction of 11.44 lakh hectares of forest land, double the size of Delhi, for projects since Forest Conservation Act came into force in 1980 for developmental projects. This means an annual average of 35,775 hectares of forest land diverted.

The UNEP report estimated that the ecosystem services and other non-marketed goods account for between 47% and 89% of the so-called 'GDP of the poor' for India, whereas in Indonesia and Brazil the national GDP -- agriculture, forestry and fisheries account for only 6% to 17%. Sukhdev said the markets were not a solution to social problems and some cases, they tend, to complicate the matters.

To understand how the ecosystem services help poor's economy, the environment ministry will soon be commissioning a study on impact of ecosystem management on lives of people living in bio-diverse rich areas, a ministry official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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