Drought and Livelihood Strategies in Andhra Pradesh, India

Bornali Dutta, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)
Chandrashekhar Singh, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

The study examines livelihood strategies of the drought victims. It uses the second round of Young Lives data collected in the year 2005-06. To find out the livelihood strategies of drought victims, out of the large number of responses, four categories have been made namely used credit, insurance and savings; migrated to work and worked more, help from Government/NGOs/ community; and others. Multivariate analysis has been carried out to find out determinants of livelihood strategies. The results also shows that used credit, insurance and savings (32%) are by far the most important strategy, followed by migrated to work and working more (27%). The multinomial logit regression analysis shows that socio-economically backward households belonging to Rayalaseema and Telangana regions having more than 7 members are statistically significant predictor for working more as a livelihood strategy. Other important predictors are households registered under NREGA and using scientific agriculture.