Abstract:
The Ganges River Basin (GRB) covers a land
area of 1.086 million square kilometers (km2) and
cuts across four south Asian countries, with India,
Nepal, Bangladesh and China taking up 79%,
14%, 4% and 3% of this area, respectively (Figure
1). Mean annual river flow volume of the entire
basin is estimated to be in the order of over 550
billion cubic meters (Bm3).
The GRB is home to 8.3% of the world’s
7.3 billion population, and is one of the densest
poverty hot spots in the entire world. There were
158 million low-income people, accounting for
26% of the basin population in 2011. More than
450 million (or 80%) of the basin population
are under multi-dimensional poverty conditions
(Amarasinghe et al. 2016), which means that they
lack adequate education, health and standard
of living (Alkire and Santos 2011). The majority
of the basin population lives in rural areas, and
depends on agriculture for food and livelihood
security (Sharma et al. 2010), which, in turn,
significantly depend on the availability of, and
access to, water in the Ganges River.
