To the hands of the poor: water and trees

We have written this book for all those concerned with rural poverty and resources: policy-makers, including political leaders, planners, technical specialists and administrators, at both Union and State level; the headquarters and field staff of Government Departments and NGOs, academics, scholars and consultants; aid agency staff; and the many journalists, lawyers and other concerned professionals and citizens who are engaged in the struggle to see what best to do.
For this book is part of that struggle. It has its origins in a seminar at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi. The subject was the cruel paradox of mass poverty coexisting with vast resource potentials in much of rural India. These potentials were seen to lie in changing resource access and use, and included canal irrigation, lift irrigation, land reform, wastelands development, forests, and agroforestry. Ideas were sought about approaches which would be politically and administratively feasible. Realism demanded that while the poorer would gain, the less poor would not directly lose, or could be induced to accept their loss. This helped to narrow the focus to lift irrigation and trees. Both presented large-scale potentials which had not yet been exploited. We found evidence that key aspects of both had been neglected and that the scope for benefits to the poorer were greater than commonly supposed. Evidence and argument led us logically to new policies.