How floods harm learning: indirect pathways, coping, and inequality in north India

• In Event: The climate crisis and learning and development: some global perspectives

Proposal

This study considers the ways flooding reshapes schooling and learning in flood-prone North India, drawing on fieldwork across four districts, complemented by descriptive analyses from the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) Waves I–II. The study is guided by two questions: (i) how communities cope with flood exposure in ways that affect children’s schooling and learning, and through which pathways floods operate; and (ii) how dimensions of marginality shape both exposure and the scope of coping strategies. We center how inequality intersects with coping to produce uneven educational outcomes under frequent and cumulative flood risk.
Our fieldwork points to need to consider “floor effects” on learning losses in some of the most vulnerable communities. In some highly resource-constrained settings in rural India, baseline learning is already low due to school, household, community, and institutional factors. In such contexts, large “learning losses” may be less visible in test scores, yet flood exposure amplifies vulnerability in other ways—prolonged absenteeism, grade repetition, dropout—and entrenches marginalization. Temporary shocks become path-dependent setbacks where families lack buffers to reverse cumulative shocks. In rural North India—where subsistence agriculture and casual wage labor dominate—educational recovery is especially fragile.
We employ a mixed-methods design. Semi-structured interviews and site observations with school leaders and teachers, community members, and village officials in repeatedly flooded communities followed a common guide on schooling context and grade-level goals; direct and indirect effects of flooding; household coping; and institutional response and coordination. Qualitative insights are situated against IHDS-based descriptive patterns in school and village characteristics.
Some preliminary findings emerge. First, floods operate as acute shocks—damaging classrooms and materials, hindering access, and prompting closures or relocation—but the most consequential harms travel indirectly and persist: income and asset losses, indebtedness, temporary or permanent resettlement, increased child work/caregiving, and shifts in perceived returns to schooling. These pathways help explain non-return and compounding deficits across repeated events. Second, institutional responses are adaptive but often inadequate. Schools and communities improvise—moving classes to higher sites, adjusting hours, pooling materials—yet adaptations are ad hoc, under-resourced, and sometimes exclusionary for marginalized children. Pre-existing frictions—multigrade classrooms without clear grade-specific targets, limited remedial provision after closures, and unstable attendance systems—amplify losses. Respondents repeatedly described a recovery gap: schedules resume, but systematic learning recovery seldom follows. Third, vulnerability is uneven. Children from poorer households, marginalized caste/religious communities, riverbank settlements, and those with less-educated parents face higher baseline risk and more persistent setbacks, reflecting greater exposure of assets and livelihoods, higher likelihood of migration or child labor, and fewer resources to support catch-up. Occasional agricultural benefits rarely offset educational harms for the most vulnerable.
Overall, return to class is not the same as return to learning, and local adaptations remain precarious under resource constraints. Pairing fieldwork with IHDS-based context, we offer a grounded account of how floods interact with societal inequalities to shape learning.

Authors

• Nazar Khalid, University of Pennsylvania

• Emily Hannum, University of Pennsylvania

• JERE RICHARD BEHRMAN, University of Pennsylvania

• Amrit Thapa, University of Pennsylvania