Long-term Health Consequences of Early Childhood Exposure to the Indian Drought of 2002

Droughts are recurrent features of the Indian climatic fabric. A single month's failure (or delay) of the annual monsoon can wield a debilitating blow—in varying degrees—to Indian agriculture and the livelihoods of people, particularly the rural populace. In 2002, large parts of the country experienced one of the most intense droughts recorded in India in the last 25 years.  While losses in agricultural income and man-days of rural employment have been widely acknowledged, the long-term health consequences of the drought remain unknown.

Combining Young Lives' longitudinal data from Andhra Pradesh in India, with district-level rainfall data from the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Government of Andhra Pradesh; this essay provides the first estimates of the long-term impact of the drought on the height attainment of a sub-sample of young individuals from below-poverty line households, who experienced this rainfall shock at the ages of 0-18 months (younger cohort), or 7-8.5 years (older cohort). This essay also examines the role of a large-scale rural poverty alleviation program—Indira Kranthi Patham—in mitigating the health impact of the drought for "poor" children.

Using WHO anthropometric z-scores of height-for-age as the outcome variable in static and dynamic specifications, this essay employs several estimation strategies to correct for econometric issues: first-difference estimator for solving endogeneity arising from time-invariant, unobserved heterogeneity; and an instrumental variables strategy (difference generalised method of moments, or difference GMM) to solve the endogeneity arising from lagged height-for-age scores in the dynamic specification.

Our estimates indicate a loss of 0.8 standard deviations in height-for-age z-scores for the younger, drought-affected cohort of "poor" children; while their older counterparts suffer a decline of 0.4 standard deviations in height-for-age z-scores. While the program under consideration had a positive and significant impact on the height-attainment of our sub-sample of "poor" children, this impact is not large enough to mitigate the perils of the drought. It is hoped that these findings will not merely highlight the importance of nutrition and care in the sensitive period of early childhood, but will also bring children to the centre-stage of poverty debates in developing countries; while underlining the paramount need to protect children against shocks through welfare programs.