Rural household livelihood vulnerability and mitigation strategies – Need for a Government intervention

Abstract

Sustainable development report (2017) has observed that globally the natural and economic shocks have caused a loss of 250 billion to 300 billion US dollars a year. Also, the vulnerability to shocks is found to be high in developing and under-developed countries. In those regions, rural households are particularly more vulnerable to shocks in those regions. The most common household shocks are an income earner's illness or death, business failure, dwelling demolition, theft, drought, farmlands destruction due to fire or flood, long spells of unemployment, and price hikes for farm inputs and food stuffs. The studies have also observed that the risks\shocks are vicious in nature and they may hinder the household's capacity to recover and push them towards vulnerability. These observations bring to light an important possibility that the vulnerability factors could be both contagious and cumulative in its effect. Understanding the transmission mechanism and breaking the vicious cycle assumes importance in this context. There are different approaches to studying the vicious propagations of vulnerability.