Quantifying household vulnerability triggered by drought: evidence from rural India

Abstract

Drought is a complex, slow-onset phenomenon that imposes serious challenges on human beings and ecosystems. The vulnerability associated with drought may vary at different social, geographical and temporal scales. These differences emphasize the need for regional-level vulnerability assessments, which in turn helps to formulate efficient adaptation policies and strategies that are suitable for the region to mitigate the drought risk. The objective of this paper is to quantify the livelihood and socioeconomic vulnerability of rural households that are affected by drought in rural India. The Livelihood Vulnerability Index and Socioeconomic Vulnerability Index were applied to analyse the vulnerability of rural households. A sample size of 157 rural households from the state of Odisha in India was surveyed in 2015. Sociodemographic characteristics such as low literacy rates, high dependency ratios and weak housing structures make people more vulnerable, whereas access to social networks plays a significant role in supporting poor rural households. The research concludes that the impacts of drought make people who are already vulnerable due to poverty, inequality and marginalization even more vulnerable. The outcomes of this study may be considered in formulating effective coping strategies and policies that may help mitigate the drought risk. The findings and recommendations of this study will find applicability in other rural, natural resource-dependent countries with similar socioeconomic profiles such as other south Asian countries.

Migration as a driver of changing household structures: implications for local livelihoods and adaptation

“…The various household structures discussed in Table 3 contrast sharply with typical vulnerability and adaptation studies in India that examine households as male-and female-headed (e.g. Kuppannan, Haileslassie, & Kakumanu, 2015;Sam, Kumar, Kächele, & Müller, 2016). Using the expanded list of household structures in Table 3, the implications of these altered household configurations on risk management strategies are examined in Figure 2.…”

Linking Food Security with Household’s Adaptive Capacity and Drought Risk: Implications for Sustainable Rural Development

“…Droughts directly affect agriculture (Edame et al 2011), while they indirectly affect economic growth, income distribution, household welfare and agricultural demand (Schmidhuber and Tubiello 2007). Overall impact of drought may be reduction in agricultural production, purchasing power and employment opportunities resulting into serious threat of hunger, food insecurity, poverty and malnutrition in any region of the world (Kumar and Sharma 2013;Sam et al 2016).…”

Vulnerabilities to flood hazards among rural households in India

“…In addition, less favourable social, economic and institutional conditions make them more vulnerable to flood risk (Patnaik and Narayanan 2010). Due to the lack of information regarding the degree of flood vulnerability of rural households, improved adaptation policies and programmes to mitigate the flood risk cannot be formulated in an effective way (Sam et al 2016). A micro-level vulnerability analysis helps to identify the most vulnerable sections of the population and the most impacted livelihood resources of a particular region (Aryal et al 2014).…”