Drought displaces agricultural labor: Evidence from 450,000 Indian villages

Drought threatens the agricultural livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. Nowhere is this risk larger than in India, where agriculture still employs 275 million people, by far the world’s biggest farming workforce. Here we present results from a new village-level panel that links agricultural employment data for 450,000 villages to 0.05° daily climate grids, enabling us to track each village’s drought exposure month by month. Every single month of drought during the June–October growing season reduced the share of people working in agriculture the following year by 1.2 percentage points. Nationally, this translates to ~3.3 million fewer people working in farming for each extra month of drought (95 % CI: 2.1– 4.5 million). Because rural India offers few alternative jobs, such losses are likely to trigger surges of circular labor migration to towns and cities. Using CMIP6 mid-century projections, we estimate that by 2050 the average village will experience 1.5–2.0 more drought months each year. In the absence of adaptation, this would imply ~5.1–6.5 million fewer people working in agriculture in an average year, potentially amplifying rural-to-urban migration flows and increasing pressure on urban systems already struggling to provide jobs, housing, and basic services.