Water in poverty alleviation (SDG 1)

Poverty is recognized to be multidimensional and hence requires multipronged interventions for its alleviation. Water plays an important role in poverty alleviation (meeting the SDG 1 targets), and that too in multiple ways. As an economic good, water is a critical factor in raising farm productivity (and hence incomes) of small and marginal farmers that comprise many of the rural poor, while providing a safety net for the poor in general through lower food prices. Safe drinking water is a social good, protecting the health of the poor from avoidable disease burden and ensuring individual productive capacity. A more broad-based, sustained impact on poverty is achieved when water is recognized as an environmental good, and steps are taken to improve watersheds, restore waterbodies, and recharge aquifers. Water as an institutional good is creating new opportunities for benefit transfer through instruments such as payments for ecosystem services. Water for irrigated agriculture and the shifting nature of poverty are explained through a case study of North Gujarat (India) where intense water infrastructure development has happened over the past five decades. It supports the idea that water is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for poverty alleviation since it often creates new inequalities in the wake of large-scale poverty alleviation initiatives. For sustainable poverty alleviation, water interventions must seek to restore degraded natural water systems and expand their functional abilities to provide sustainable ecosystem services.