This book by Kanchan Chopra and SC Gulati dwells upon the inter-linkages in India’s arid and semi-arid regions. The authors’ hypothesis is that the establishment of property rights through institutional intervention is the key to mitigating poverty and to stemming migration from rural to urban areas. The document provides conclusive evidence concerning the impact of institutional changes on environmental upgradation and socio-economic improvement.

This publication attempts to break the prevailing urban myth that ‘poverty leads to environmental degradation’. In fact, degradation of the natural resource base in rural areas resulting in degradation-pushed migration to urban areas suggests just the reverse. It seems that degradation induced poverty prevails in Rural India. The book explores this complex nature of inter-linkages between poverty and environmental degradation.

The authors suggest that the resurrection of appropriate common property rights, through interventions, in rural areas could hold the key to stemming the tide of both distress out-migration and environmental degradation. The study has emanated as a result of a long-term interaction with a large number of village based communities of Rajasthan to understand the dynamics of their behaviour vis-ŕ-vis natural resources, with the help of local grassroots NGOs like Ubeshwar Vikas Mandal (UVM) and Sewa Mandir. The document also reveals the harsh realities of rural life and positive interventions by the NGOs to ease the burden of the rural poor.

The study deals with the magnitude of the vicious degradation-poverty cycle, in terms of degraded common property resources, in the Indian sub-continent as a whole and in arid and semi-arid zones in particular. The major point of departure of this study is the utilization of econometric techniques to view institutional changes in rural areas and determines its impact on environmental upgradation, socio-economic conditions and distress out-migration from rural tracts.

The study provides certain distinct insights into the complex relationship between people and the environment from which they derive their livelihoods. At the same time, it depicts the organizational evolution of the outside institutions. It provides an analysis of the processes underlying the evolution and working of the two organizations, UVM and Sewa Mandir, representing two different paradigms with respect to rural development.

The study concludes that institutional change, induced mainly by non-government organizations, positively influences the productivity of natural resources by creating well-defined property rights and the enforcing mechanisms. This results in curtailing the out-migration from rural to urban areas, as per the authors.