Mushfiq Mobarak, Bishal Chalise and Corey Vernot write in Nepali Times:
One of us (Mobarak) has been leading a team collecting large-sample data on the rural poor across 90 villages in Kailali and Kanchanpur to track labour mobility, wages, remittances, food security, and mental health before and after the lockdown. We collected five rounds of data from 2,600 households in monthly intervals since September 2019, and conducted the most recent round of phone surveys in April, 2020 immediately after the lockdown measures were enforced.
[...]Total hours in income-generating (wage or non-farm business) work for prime-age males have decreased 75% since January. Men are spending a bit more of that time on their own farm, but even accounting for that, total work hours are significantly below even the pre-harvest lean season in October. [...]The lockdown has had even larger effects on migrant families, because there has been a 61% dip in the remittance receipts since lockdown. A large part of this is because migrants who would normally be away, earning income elsewhere, were forced to return home; 65% of the migrants who were in either India or other cities in Nepal during 1 January – 1 April 2020 returned home in a rush during the first two weeks of April. Further, individual migrants who are still away are only able to send half of what they used to send before the lockdown. [...]Some 65% of our respondents worried about having enough food in the house when we spoke to them in late April. As a benchmark, that number was 67% in September-October 2019 (during the pre-harvest lean season), and 43% in January after the rice harvest.
[..]In an experiment, when we provided some of these poor, rural, migrant-dependent households loans during the pre-harvest lean season in 2019, they invested a large portion of that money buying fertiliser. Agricultural investment was significantly higher than those who did not receive such loans.
