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Promoting dialogue on development in South Asia

 

March 2008

Water, climate change, and the poor

Submitted by Praful Patel on Tue, 03/04/2008 - 09:27

Four hundred million people--if it were a country, it would be the third largest in the world--rely on the Ganges River and its tributaries for their livelihood.    Six thousand rivers provide a perennial source of irrigation and power to one of the world’s most densely populated and poorest areas.  The Himalayas, “the water tower of the Ganges,” provide 45 percent of the annual flow.  These facts represent the potential payoffs to the populations of Bangladesh, India and Nepal as well as the threat that climate change poses to poor and already &lt

India, service delivery and aid: Devesh Kapur responds

Submitted by Shanta Devarajan on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 00:16

Dear Shanta:
I want to clarify. My point was not that the World Bank stop or reduce lending to India per se. Rather that it focus on those areas where it has comparative advantage (how do we know what areas those are?), conditional on Indian states’ doing more on social sectors but using some output performance indicators rather than inputs.