Measuring Water Poverty: A cross-country study using the water poverty index

Abstract

At the current time, policies are widely guided using accurate and reasonable indicators of progress in their respective field, thus indicators related to environmental resources are also the need of the hour. It is clearly visible by taking a look at the conventional assessments of water resources that they all were either only applicable on a country scale or lacked the links with the social factors surrounding water use. In this thesis, we give reasons in favour of an indicator of water stress and scarcity taking into account all the socio-economic factors directly or indirectly related to it. The conceptual framework for the index is that a region can be termed water poor due to a number of reasons- lack of availability of water, people’s ability to access the water, taking a long time to fetch the available water, can’t afford to pay for the water. All of these factors cumulatively determine if a region is water poor or rich.