The key objective of the unit’s environment and poverty campaign is to demonstrate the linkage between environment and poverty, analyse the environmental causes of poverty and push for environmental solutions to it. This means challenging the conventional notion of poverty and redefining it with environment as the axis of the economy -- from GNP (gross national product) to gross nature product (GNP).

CSE sees India’s poverty as ‘ecological poverty’ unlike what the conventional economists say as ‘income poverty’. India being a dominantly bio-mass-based society, ecological degradation triggers poverty. Thus it needs to be fixed by regenerating the ecology with people at the helms of affairs. Healthy lands and ecosystems, when used in sustainable ways, can provide all the wealth that is needed for economically viable, healthy and dignified lives. The challenge today lies in empowering and mobilizing people to enable them to escape from their ‘ecological poverty’, in order to create natural wealth, and develop a robust local economy.

The overall aim of this campaign is to influence the policy debate for moving towards participatory poverty eradication strategies that would involve poor people in the management of their environment and natural resource base. The campaign does knowledge-based advocacy through policy research and dissemination. It monitors key government rural development programmes, disseminates community experiences on sustainable livelihood and poverty eradication and pushes for factoring ecology as the base for rural economy.

	Time to rethink our future It has been 20 years since the World Commission on Environment and Development formulated a ‘global agenda for change’ and proposed long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by 2000. We have not only missed a deadline but also the key message from the first global concern on environment and development linkages. The debate over the definition of sustainable development still rages but the reality of poverty born out of bad environment remains. more >> Read the complete report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987. Panchayat ministry seeks World Bank support The Union ministry of panchayati raj (MoPR) is seeking support from the World Bank for a new initiative in which panchayats across the country will compete with each other to get extra funds from the Centre. Under the new Panchayat Empowerment and Accountability Incentive Scheme (PEAIS), a panchayat delivering better service while ensuring transparency in financial dealings will get access to extra funds. “Empowerment of the panchayat is the responsibility of the state and ensuring accountability is the responsibility of the panchayat members. This scheme seeks to incentivise the states for empowering panchayats and for making them (panchayats) more accountable and transparent,” says Union minister for panchayati raj Mani Shankar Aiyar. The current design aims at linking the PEAIS fund for each state to its degree of devolution of powers to panchayats in the previous year. “It is not aimed at rewarding the best and punishing the worst. Rather, it seeks to incentivise the progress. It is a good indication about how far a state has progressed in utilising the design of devolution,” says Aiyar. While the World Bank is processing the MoPR’s proposal, it may provide fodder for all those who are critical of the World Bank’s involvement in such an initiative. Read interview with Mani Shankar Aiyar >> Development spending: revenue or capital expenditure? As the Union government prepares to abolish revenue deficits under the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act by next year, development spending has come under the hammer. The Centre has proposed that states bear the burden of social sector spending -- a move unacceptable to states. Development economists offer a way out: keep such spending out from the revenue expenditure account. more >> PESA: decadent decade Worried by the slow implementation of the Provision of Panchayats, Extension to Scheduled Areas Act (PESA) 1996, the Union ministry of panchayati raj has -- in its mid-term report -- cautioned that non-implementation of PESA may further trigger tribal unrest. Read more Backward Regions Grant Fund hits road block The recently declared Backward Regions Grant Fund (BRGF) may not be up for implementation in November as declared by the Union Ministry of Panchayati Raj. The hitch: most of the states have failed to set up district planning committees (DPCs), a mandatory requirement to avail funds under the scheme. Read more Behind the Agrarian Crisis [Agriculture] The conventional notion of agrarian distress being part of the broader landscape of underdeveloped agriculture and backwardness no longer fits the emerging evidences from rural India. Download pdf   Special People's assessment of the MDGs? Action policy aid report Download pdf
	For further information contact:  richard@cseindia.org