Background

Poverty maps are becoming important tools for developing effective policies aimed at reducing inequalities within countries. In recent years there is a growing number of initiatives to collect or construct geographically disaggregated indicators that provide information about the spatial distribution of inequality and poverty within a country. While such information is useful for understanding the incidence and magnitude of poverty across space, in most instances, they fail to provide adequate explanations for the underlying causes and consequences of spatial patterns of poverty. This study is an attempt to analyze the links between spatial concentrating of poverty in river basins and access to water and land resources.

The research questions

• Who are the poor and where are they located in the river basin?
• How are poor constituencies in the Krishna basin spatially distributed?
• Is there a link between concentrations of poverty in particular constituencies and access water and land resources?
• How does differential access to land and water in the Krishna basin determine people's choice of production systems and how do their choices affect poverty and food security?
• What type of land use, crop choice and cropping patterns should be promoted in constituencies and hydronomic zones where the poor are concentrated?

Objectives

Overall objective of the study is to contribute to poverty alleviation and food security in the Krishna basin by advancing scientific frontiers in assessing and effective targeting of anti-poverty interventions. The specific objectives are to generate reliable statistical and cartographic products for locating the poor and food insecure in the Krishna basin, and analyze causal relationships between spatial concentration of poverty and access to adequate and water supply and land resources

Methods

• The study is being carried out in three phases. In the first phase, the analysis is confined to the lower Krishna which comprises of 9 districts in Andhra Pradesh. The second phase will focus on the Mid-Krishna (Karnataka) and the third phase will concentrate on Maharashtra. The on-going study in Andhra Pradesh is being carried out in collaboration with the Command Area Development Authority of the Government of Andhra Pradesh and VIStA, an NGO based in Andhra Pradesh.
• The poverty measure used is the proportion of households in each mandal (sub-district) that are below the poverty line as determined by the Below Poverty Line (BPL) Census of 2002. The BPL Census is a score based ranking of each household on the basis of 13 indicators of representing economic and social attributes of poverty. This is in contrast to the income and expenditure approach in the previous census. On the basis of the individual scores of households, the mandals are classified into four categories: Ultra Poor, Very Poor, Poor and Non Poor.
• Spatial regression analysis was done with proportion households in mandals as the dependent variable and variables representing selected geographical or locational factors and socio-economic attributes and explanatory variables. Beyond the spatial analysis of poverty the study will employ diverse methodologies to establish the determinants of the water-land-poverty nexus in the selected sub-basins. Such methodologies will range from the application of participatory rural appraisal techniques, multivariate statistical techniques, sustainable livelihood systems approach and vulnerability profiling which is being increasingly adopted in poverty analysis.
• A distinct feature of the present study is the choice of the river basin as the geographical unit for mapping. The choice is based on the assertion that in developing countries poverty is predominantly a rural phenomenon. Given the importance of water for poverty alleviation and food security in rural areas, a river basin is considered as the most appropriate unit of analysis. The river basin will be delineated into hydronomic zones defined as geographically homogeneous regions in a basin for which similar recommendations can be made. From the methodological point of view, the challenge in mapping of water-land-poverty and food security is the creative use of exiting data gathered from administrative boundaries to locate and characterize poverty in river basins.

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