Climate change has increased the frequency of drought occurrence in various parts of the world. Drought as a complex phenomenon causes severe impacts on ecological and socio-economic status. Short-term and long-term occurrences of drought have made many regions vulnerable globally. This paper makes an attempt to assess drought vulnerability in Godavari Middle Sub-basin of India. Twenty-four site specific socio-economic and environmental factors were identified based on the extensive literature review. Drought frequency was assessed using standardized precipitation index (SPI). These datasets were divided into training (70%) and testing (30%) data. Frequency ratio (FR) model was utilized to establish relationship among drought conditioning factors and drought frequency. Weights obtained from the FR model were used as input to the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) model. Drought vulnerability results were validated using the testing data and receiver operating characteristic (ROC). The accuracy of ANFIS models for 1-month (0.957), 3-months (0.882), 6-months (0.964) and 12-months (0.938) showed high suitability of ANFIS model for the assessment of drought vulnerability. The findings revealed that very low normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and increasing trend of highest maximum and mean maximum temperature were major environmental factors which influenced high drought vulnerability in the sub-basin. High proportion of area under fallow land, high infant mortality rate (IMR) and moderate literacy rate were identified as major socio-economic factors making watersheds vulnerable during short and long-term droughts. Largest area of the sub-basin was found under high vulnerability for 3-months, followed by 6-months and 12-months droughts. Thus, the study calls for policy intervention towards lessening the impact of drought in highly vulnerable watersheds.