The Impact of Water Access on Short-Term Migration in Rural India
Scientists expect that increased climate variability will amplify future stresses on the hydrological cycle. The Indian subcontinent and its monsoon climate are particularly vulnerable to these changes. In this paper, we study the relationship between two important adaptation mechanisms used by rural households in India: irrigation; and short-term migration. Irrigation is one of the most important adaptation methods used by farmers in response to risks associated with rainfall variability with groundwater providing the most reliable source of water. In addition to irrigation, and partially because of it, many households have resorted to additional coping mechanisms. One of the most important is short-term migration. While short-term migration plays a role in reducing income uncertainty on its own, our interest in this paper is in how short-term migration interacts with the different sources and dimensions of groundwater irrigation.
As far as we are aware, this is the first paper to integrate irrigation access with short-term migration decisions to demonstrate how multiple adaptation strategies interact in the context of increasing rainfall variability, a fundamental environmental change impacting the Indian subcontinent.
In this paper, we highlight the relationship between two distinct adaptation responses: groundwater irrigation; and short-term migration; and show that groundwater availability and access do have an economically significant impact on rural, short-term labor mobility. The results from our empirical model suggest that short-term migration decisions respond to past rainfall variability and to the agricultural opportunity costs associated with irrigation. Precisely, our results demonstrate that access to secure water resources determines the relative benefits of short-term migration with more reliable sources reducing the need for short-term migration. Specifically, tube wells, which provide a consistent source of water, allow individuals to specialize in agricultural-related activities and help small landholders to profitably farm even in times of water scarcity, which in turn reduces the benefit of short-term migration. We confirm these results using plausibility exogenous variation in the geological characteristics of groundwater aquifers, which have influenced the development of groundwater infrastructure and related technology.
Migration is an important risk-reduction strategy for households in developing countries. In this paper, we examine the impact of irrigation and its interaction with rainfall on short-term migration decisions in India. Our results show that migration responds to costs, and that deep fossil-water wells, which provide a constant source of water, eliminate any benefit of short-term migration. Our results also demonstrate that electricity availability lowers the likelihood of short-term migration even in areas where groundwater is significantly reduced. This suggests that regions with access to electricity are able to adapt and shift to new technologies that facilitate additional groundwater extraction.