Gujarat’s Little Rann of Kutch, producing a third of India's salt, faces rising climate threats. The Agariyas, its traditional salt workers, balance fragile livelihoods with ecological pressures
Gujarat is India’s undisputed salt heartland, churning out roughly three-quarters of the nation’s supply; almost one-third of that comes from a single landscape — the Little Rann of Kutch (LRK), which is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in the future. The community responsible for carrying out this painstaking work is locally known as the Agariyas. Kodi Thakurs by caste, they have for generations harvested salt from the moody salt flats of the regions of Kutch and Surendranagar
The 8000 Agariyas in this region have an intricate relationship with biodiversity, ecology and salt flat lands. On one hand the community is dependent on the moody salt flat lands and on the other hand they have a complicated relationship with the ecosystem which is home to wild asses, migratory birds, buffaloes and more. The land belongs to the Forest Department and it is being rented and sublet to the Agariyas. However, the Agariyas are dependent on rain, climatic variables like sun rays, wind, rain for their livelihood from the salt brine. Climate change can impact these variables and can impact their livelihoods in the future.
Cooler nights that slow evaporation, unseasonal cyclones that drown half-harvested pans, and deeper bore-wells that gamble on shrinking aquifers all pose problems to the continuity of the Agariyas work. As the Agariyas sit at the far edge of formal protection — many of them lack land titles, grid power or ‘crop’ insurance and climate variability threatens not only India’s lowest-carbon salt but also some of its most precarious livelihoods.
Research Gap
While salt production has been modelled hydrologically, currently there is a gap in terms of assessment of climate vulnerability through a vulnerability framework for communities like salt pan, tea estate workers and other marginal labour segments of India whose livelihoods are dependent on climate variables . Our study creates such a scalable framework by using the variables exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity into a single relationship pattern defined as — (Exposure + Sensitivity — Adaptive Capacity = Vulnerability).
The framework therefore provides climate policy planners an assessment structure that helps in understanding the position of the climate vulnerability of each household in adverse climatic situations relative to each other in terms of their exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.
This framework therefore creates an operational tool for future climate policy making at a downscaled level in climate vulnerable villages, districts of India and can help civil society and change makers working at the grass roots in climate vulnerable communities.
Vulnerability in this case was measured in the following way-
Variables used: The composite climate vulnerability index uses 28 questionnaire items grouped under 7 exposure indicators (e.g., flood frequency, unexpected rain, wind shifts), 9 sensitivity indicators (eg income share from salt, months worked, heat illness, etc.) and 12 adaptive-capacity indicators (eg access to training, savings, solar pumps, co-op membership).
Data sources: An on-ground survey of 499 households across Surendranagar district, capping responses to 35 per village was taken to maximise spatial spread.
Computation: The individual scores of each indicator were standardised, normalised and then the principal component loading was done to assign weightages to the indicators. Further, scores were min-max normalised (0-1), then combined multiplicatively to avoid hiding extreme values. K-means clustering (k = 3) was conducted and households were grouped into low, medium and high vulnerability bands; the centroids estimated were updated automatically as new data arrived.
Some of the startling findings that emerged from our exercise are-
No family is without risk: The bell curve never touches 0, no Agariya family is immune to the effects of climate change.
Most workers sit on a knife-edge of “moderate” risk: The cohort’s mean vulnerability index is 0.57 on a 0-2 scale; 68 per cent fall between 0.46 and 0.68. That bell-shaped spread means small improvements in adaptive capacity could tip a large share into the low-risk bracket.
High-risk households are not a minority: K-means results show 198 households (40 per cent) in the high-vulnerability cluster, where high exposure and sensitivity coincide with weak buffers.
Technology gaps persist: Field responses show 86 per cent already operate Government-subsidised solar pumps, leaving roughly one in seven families to rely on diesel sets that cost Rs 600-Rs 800 per operational day — an expense that spikes when post-monsoon cyclones push the season later into hotter months.
Scalability and Policy Directions: Future Perspectives
Results of our climate vulnerability framework based analysis for salt pan workers open out multiple directions for future discourses on climate vulnerability studies for marginal communities of India. The directions are as follows-
Scalability & applicability
The vulnerability framework studies various aspects of marginal life and livelihood — health, access to financial help, education and land ownership. These factors are common to many other climate vulnerable marginal populations and can be applied to study their vulnerability and economic and social resilience. As the index relies on simple normalisation and clustering algorithms, any livelihood that maps onto the exposure — sensitivity — capacity triad can reuse it. This scale can be modified for any form of farming/natural element dependent means of income easily, and further form a Vulnerability Framework that can be used on for farming and other marginal workers too who are climate dependent for their livelihoods.
The pertinent important policy directions which emerge out of our study are-
Policy directions
Close the pump gap: If policy implementation at the local level can supply solar pumps to the remaining 14 per cent of Agariya families, it would move 112 households out of the high-risk cluster: however this would mean a one time bulk fiscal outlay of Rs 2 crore.
Credit tied to vulnerability scores: Financial inclusion and risk hedging policies and its implementation at a local level can ensure that local regional rural banks can use the vulnerability index as a risk metric, unlocking lower-interest working-capital loans for the 302 households scoring < 0.60.
Targeted training & weather alerts: Policies need to be designed and implemented to prioritise high-cluster households for adaptive-capacity training and push SMS-based “shutdown-day” alerts using IMD forecasts.
Integrate inland salt workers into state climate-action plans: Gujarat nhs current state climate action plan lists coastal aquaculture and rain-fed farming, but not desert salt production; hence adding this sector would make the Agariyas eligible for existing adaptation funding and can address their climate vulnerability risks for future.
(Dr Bahaar Jain is Consultant, ACPET; Dr Anandajit Goswami is Research Fellow, ACPET and Ritam Chowdhury is intern, ACPET)
