Drought Vulnerability Assessment of India Using Meteorological, Agricultural and Socioeconomic Indicators

Abstract:

Monsoon in India is getting extreme with an altered spatiotemporal pattern of rainfall. Farmers are increasingly becoming victims of climate change due to crop failures as a result of uncertain weather and prolonged water scarcity. These events are leading to increased vulnerability to droughts. This study proposes an indicator-based framework to assess the drought vulnerability across India.This study considers two different types of drought vulnerabilities that is, agricultural and socioeconomic. The data on indicators have been collected from various authorised agencies that include the Census of India and India Meteorological Department for the period 1980 -2018. The data imputation for missing data has been performed using random forest method. Multicollinearity check has been performed on data using the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) to select the indicators (7 out of 11 socioeconomic and 7 out of 20 agricultural). Utilising the indicators of agricultural (yield of food grains, total cropped area, unirrigated area etc.), socioeconomic (literacy rate, population density, social expenditure etc.) and meteorological (rainfall), drought vulnerability indices have been calculated. Here, the Shannon entropy weighting method has been used for agricultural and socioeconomic droughts vulnerability, whereas standard precipitation index (SPI) for meteorological drought. Cluster analysis has been performed on the indices to classify the states and union territories into 3 clusters based on their vulnerability to drought. Our analysis finds that states that are highly vulnerable to agricultural drought include Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, while the states with high socioeconomic vulnerability include Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. Moreover, the linkages among meteorological, agricultural and socioeconomic vulnerabilities are also investigated.