Purpose – We examine whether droughts are differently associated with high school dropout of girls and boys from marginal and small agricultural households compared to other households. While non-agricultural households may adopt a utility maximization framework regarding educational investments, marginal or small agricultural households have to make an additional profit maximization decision regarding production and choice of inputs in their farm including differential deployment of female or male family labour in and outside their farms.

Methodology – With discrete-time survival analysis, we examine the association of droughts with the hazards of high school dropout by combining publicly available data from two rounds of the India Human Development Survey ( 2004-05 and 2011-12) with ICRISAT district-level rainfall data for India.

Findings – We find that the hazard of dropout of girls from high school significantly reduces in drought years in marginal and small agricultural households while boys in marginal agricultural households face a significantly higher hazard of high school dropout. We observe that the hazard of dropout of girls in marginal agricultural households increases significantly if there was a drought in the previous academic year.

Practical implications –Effective policy interventions are needed to provide high school education to all in the face of climate change and increasing drought frequency across India.

Originality – We uniquely contribute by combining data from different publicly available datasets and deploying discrete-time survival analysis to bring out the heterogenous relationship between drought and high school dropout of boys and girls in marginal and small agricultural households.

Authors:
Soumik Biswas, Indian Institute of Management Lucknow Noida Campus, India
Kaushik Bhattacharya, Indian Institute of Management Lucknow Noida Campus, India

About the Presenter(s)
Mr Soumik Biswas is a University Doctoral Student at Indian Institute of Management Lucknow Noida Campus in India

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