Extreme Floods worsen Early Marriage & Early Motherhood
Monsoon rains can cause enormous damage. Heavy rains and landslides in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand have recently destroyed properties, crops, infrastructure and 41 lives. Extreme floods are becoming more frequent, alongside global warming. This threatens food security, development and also gender equality.
Extreme flooding may also increase early marriage and early childbirth, while lowering schooling. This comes from an important new paper in the Journal of Population Economics, by Madhulika Khanna and Nishtha Kochhar.
In 2008, heavy monsoon rain caused the Kosi river to burst through an embankment, change course, and submerge much of Northern Bihar. 1000 villages were severely affected.
A sudden negative shock
These floods were totally unexpected. Most families hadn’t experienced floods for several decades. Suddenly, they were hit by a massive economic shock. 350,000 acres of paddy were damaged. The economic loss was estimated to be around $ 135 million. 1 in 4 families were compelled to move. Almost half a million shifted into temporary camps.
Early marriage
Before the floods, there was no downward trend. Grooms were actually marrying later. Then Kosi hit. In affected districts, young men and women suddenly married younger. Men’s age of marriage fell by ten months. Male child marriage increased by 125%.
Khanna and Kochhar show this by using India’s 2015-16 National Family Health Survey. Since this includes retrospective data on age of marriage, they can track changes over time.
Why would extreme floods exacerbate early marriage?
Families may be marrying their sons early in order to secure a dowry and mitigate economic calamity. In India, the groom’s family receives a dowry from the bride’s family. The poorest, most desperate families, lacking land or credit networks, may have been especially eager to marry their sons and attract revenue.
How do we know this?
Adverse affects were most severe among:
Hindus (who typically have larger marriage payments)
Landless families, lacking safety nets or credit.
Less schooling
After the Kosi floods, secondary school completion also fell.
Age of first birth fell by six months
Women moved into other families’ homes and had children even younger.
Early marriage and early motherhood also suppressed women’s labour force participation and economic independence
After Kosi, new wives and mothers were less likely to have their own money, a bank account in their name and a mobile phone.
I envision 3 possible causal mechanisms:
Powerless young brides, controlled by patrilocal families
Existential threats of flooding exacerbated cultural tightening
Floods compounded reliance on kin, so families sought to gain respectability by adhering to ideals of female seclusion.
TLDR
Devastating floods in Bihar worsened early marriage, early motherhood, schooling and restrictive controls. This is consistent with a wider literature. In Bangladesh too, extreme weather events exacerbate early marriage. Likewise in Malawi, age of marriage falls during droughts. When bad weather hurts incomes in Turkey, families who practice bride-price marry girls younger.
Extreme weather events are also increasing, alongside climate breakdown, threatening global progress towards gender equality.
This is a great paper. But I wish the table on women's economic outcomes also compared it to men's economic outcomes. The floods were financially devastating for the entire region, so were women's economic outcomes relatively worse than men's as a result? Or was everyone affected mostly equally?