Poster #138 - Weather Shocks, Workfare, and the Farmer Suicide Crisis in India

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

One farmer commits suicide every hour in India, totaling over 8,000 deaths annually. These are not just numbers but lives lost, shattered families, and livelihoods destroyed. Weather shocks threaten food security and the agricultural economy (Aragon et al., 2021; Carleton, 2017), impacting billions reliant on agriculture. In India, over 50% of 1.4 billion people depend on small farms, mostly under 3 acres.

Questions: I examine how weather shocks affect farmer suicide rates, and whether government assistance programs can mitigate these effects, among 120+ million people in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

Significance: First, it evaluates the effectiveness of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the world's largest workfare program, which guarantees 100 days of paid manual unskilled work to rural residents. I show how this social safety net mitigates temperature-related farmer suicides through income diversification, demonstrating its crucial role in protecting agricultural households during weather-induced income shocks. Second, it utilizes a unique dataset combining high-resolution village-level weather measurements with daily farmer suicide records, enabling a novel analysis of farmer suicides using within-district variations.

Data & Methodology: I construct a village-level panel (2000–2023) of farmer suicides (confidential) and weather shocks (ERA5) across 40,000 villages, totaling 355 million daily observations, reflecting actual weather conditions on farmers’ lands.

I estimate the causal relationship between farmer suicides and weather shocks using a temperature response model from agronomic climate econometrics literature.  The village-level suicide rate (per 100,000) is modeled as a function of growing degree days and precipitation, with a linear spline of growing degree days (knots at 5°C intervals from 15°C to 35°C) to capture cold and heat stress effects.

To isolate causality, I control for confounders: cubic precipitation, village-year trends, and year fixed effects, ensuring that the estimated impact reflects temperature-induced agricultural stress rather than broader influences (Carleton, 2017).

I evaluate NREGA’s impact using its staggered rollout and a difference-in-differences approach, integrating climate econometric regressions (Taraz, 2023). This allows for assessing how NREGA mitigates weather shock effects on farmer suicides by comparing changes over time between villages with and without the program.

Results: I find that on high-temperature days (over 30°C) during the growing season, each 1°C rise in the mean temperature increases farmer suicides by 0.104 per 100,000, about 12 extra deaths statewide.  This study is the first to show a stronger sensitivity to temperatures above 30°C, with trends flat between 20°C-30°C and minimal negative effects below 20°C, suggesting a potential protective influence, contrasting (Carleton, 2017). Findings link extreme heat to suicides, warranting government support.

I find that NREGA as one such support program, significantly weakens the temperature-suicide relationship, reducing hot-day suicides from 0.38 to 0.08 per 100,000 under the program. This suggests NREGA’s financial support helps mitigate the farmer suicide crisis.

I further explore heterogeneity, finding the effect strongest in cotton-growing villages and varying with socioeconomic and infrastructure factors. 

Also, the estimated cost per life saved on a single 35°C day is approximately $183,000, while the VSL is $138.51 million, underscoring the substantial net social benefit of the program.

Author

• Prashikdivya Prabhudas Gajbhiye, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
  Presenting Author