Climate Adaptation and Gender

Leaving agriculture is widely considered to be synonymous with economic development. Since non-agricultural jobs are more common in urban areas, this often goes hand in hand with migration (Bryan et al, 2014; Gollin et al, 2014; Young, 2013). India's brick kilns have many of the hallmarks of a manufacturing employer that could serve as a gateway to economic growth. Brick kilns are located in peri-urban areas and hire an estimated 15 million workers, a large share of whom are rural migrants (Eil et al, 2023; Tibrewal et al, 2023). However, my research will argue that credit constraints breed contractual arrangements in this industry such that all surplus is extracted by employers and recruiters. As a result, brick kiln jobs fail to reduce poverty, challenging our conventional understanding of the interplay between migration and economic development.
The dominant recruitment practice in India's brick kilns has three main features (Guérin & Kumar, 2015; Kumari, 2018; Majumder, 2015; PCLRA, 2020). First, brick production is seasonal, with migrants returning to villages after each lean season to work in agriculture. Second, workers are recruited during the monsoon by middlemen. Third, middlemen pay workers a large advance, binding them to work at the kiln until this is repaid, even if workers become aware of a better job opportunity elsewhere. This advance is ultimately repaid through earnings at the kiln with a substantial interest rate.

My research will demonstrate empirically and theoretically that rural credit constraints perpetuate these contracts by encouraging individuals to forgo the possibility of high-return urban jobs in favour of immediate cash. Second, I will argue that, although workers are more productive at kilns than if they had stayed in their villages, advances keep them at subsistence levels of consumption. In this sense, the migration and occupational change created by brick kilns fail to achieve poverty reduction. Though earlier...