In School but Falling Behind: Floods, Rainfall Extremes, and Stratified Grade Progression in India

• In Event: Spatial Inequality

Abstract

Climatic disruptions increasingly threaten children’s schooling in low- and middle-income countries, yet we know little about how floods and rainfall shocks reshape educational trajectories or whether their consequences are socially stratified. Linking geocoded Demographic and Health Surveys from India (2015--16 and 2019--21) in five flood-prone states, comprising roughly 40% of India’s population, to satellite-derived inundation and gridded rainfall data, I exploit within-subdistrict variation across survey rounds to estimate associations between recent hydro-meteorological shocks and children’s schooling along two margins: participation (enrollment) and progress (grade-for-age delay among the enrolled and advancement beyond critical grade gates). India’s compulsory schooling laws guarantee enrollment through Grade 8 with automatic promotion, creating institutional conditions under which participation and progress can diverge. Flood exposure is associated with a distinctive pattern I characterize as staying enrolled while falling behind: non-enrollment declines, but enrolled children fall further behind grade-for-age benchmarks, consistent with children remaining in school while instructional continuity deteriorates. These patterns are socially stratified in ways that complicate simple narratives about climate and inequality. Historically marginalized groups, such as indigenous and religious minority adolescents, show the largest participation responses to floods, compressing pre-existing enrollment gaps along lines consistent with opportunity-cost dynamics. Older enrolled girls show the largest delays in grade progression, consistent with intrahousehold allocation patterns that treat daughters’ educational progress as more discretionary during periods of scarcity. Using a spatial decomposition, I find that associations operate primarily through area-wide disruption shared across communities within subdistricts rather than through direct exposure in flooded villages, consistent with shocks propagating through school systems, transportation networks, and local labor markets. Together, the findings suggest that the same disruptive event can compress inequality on one educational margin while widening it on another, underscoring that enrollment alone obscure a stratified learning crisis unfolding among children who remain nominally in school.

Author

• Nazar Khalid, University of Pennsylvania