Lets look at some of these measurement criteria that I'm talking about. A person in New York without a television would most certainly be poor but a person in the Godda district of Bihar in India would quite certainly not be one due to this. Their societies are so different, their requirements vary so markedly. Warm in winter, cool in summers, made with readily and cheaply available local materials and constructed with locally available labour skilled in these constructions. This is not to say that there is no poverty in the third world, there is poverty, but not the kind that we are made to believe.
Lets take the case of agricultural irrigation systems in India.
Indian agricultural irrigation is mostly centered around the monsoons and most of the rainfall occurs in about 100 hours in a year, so saving this water is very essential. Consequently traditional methods were community based as it was well understood that recharging of the water reservoirs involves construction and maintenance of various structures like tanks, small underground dams, canals etc which are best handled by the community as opposed to individuals. More over the water rights also vested in the community and hence these systems worked well for hundreds of years with adaptations as time went on, as required by the local community. During the British period, the control was taken from the communities and passed onto the hands of the public works departments who, as expected, allowed these to fall into disrepair causing hardships to the people who actually used this water. Thus communities could no longer control their own water.