Impact of Weather Shock on Food
Insecurity: A Study on India
Raju Mandal and Munmi Sarma
Abstract This chapter makes a novel attempt to examine food insecurity in India
and its variations across space and different social and religious groups. It further
intends to examine the impact of weather shock on food insecurity in India and
also identify the socio-economic factors that affect the same. The results of analysis
based on the second round of India Human Development Survey, 2011–12 reveals
large variations in the extent of household level food insecurity across India and
also its various socio-religious groups. The binary logistic regression results show
that weather shocks have a positive impact on the probability of a household to be
food insecure. Moreover, size of households, dependency ratio, poverty and urban
residence make a household more likely to be food insecure. On the other hand,
per capita income, female adult education, remittances and cultivation as the main
occupation reduce the probability of food insecurity.
Keywords Weather shock · Food insecurity · India
1 Introduction
Despite unsettled controversies about the extent and causes of changes in climatic
conditions there is now unanimity regarding the fact that the global climate has
changed noticeably during the last one century. According to a special report by
IPCC, the anthropogenic global warming reached approximately 1 °C higher than
the pre-industrial level in 2017, the increase being at the rate of 0.2 °C per decade
(Allen et al. 2018). The ongoing climate change that is expected to go from bad
to worse in the coming decades has the potential to affect different sectors of an
economy. Agricultural sector which is critically dependent on the climatic factors like
temperature and rainfall would be worst hit, especially in the developing countries.
R. Mandal (B) · M. Sarma
Department of Economics, Assam University, Silchar 788011, India
e-mail: rajum06@gmail.com
M. Sarma
e-mail: sarma.munmi@rediffmail.com
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
N. Roy et al. (eds.), Socio-economic and Eco-biological Dimensions
in Resource use and Conservation, Environmental Science and Engineering,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32463-6_17
333
Insecurity: A Study on India
Raju Mandal and Munmi Sarma
Abstract This chapter makes a novel attempt to examine food insecurity in India
and its variations across space and different social and religious groups. It further
intends to examine the impact of weather shock on food insecurity in India and
also identify the socio-economic factors that affect the same. The results of analysis
based on the second round of India Human Development Survey, 2011–12 reveals
large variations in the extent of household level food insecurity across India and
also its various socio-religious groups. The binary logistic regression results show
that weather shocks have a positive impact on the probability of a household to be
food insecure. Moreover, size of households, dependency ratio, poverty and urban
residence make a household more likely to be food insecure. On the other hand,
per capita income, female adult education, remittances and cultivation as the main
occupation reduce the probability of food insecurity.
Keywords Weather shock · Food insecurity · India
1 Introduction
Despite unsettled controversies about the extent and causes of changes in climatic
conditions there is now unanimity regarding the fact that the global climate has
changed noticeably during the last one century. According to a special report by
IPCC, the anthropogenic global warming reached approximately 1 °C higher than
the pre-industrial level in 2017, the increase being at the rate of 0.2 °C per decade
(Allen et al. 2018). The ongoing climate change that is expected to go from bad
to worse in the coming decades has the potential to affect different sectors of an
economy. Agricultural sector which is critically dependent on the climatic factors like
temperature and rainfall would be worst hit, especially in the developing countries.
R. Mandal (B) · M. Sarma
Department of Economics, Assam University, Silchar 788011, India
e-mail: rajum06@gmail.com
M. Sarma
e-mail: sarma.munmi@rediffmail.com
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
N. Roy et al. (eds.), Socio-economic and Eco-biological Dimensions
in Resource use and Conservation, Environmental Science and Engineering,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32463-6_17
333