Give them their share They will remain there
26 December 2008
Are we discussing rural-urban migration this time around? This social phenomenon forms the backdrop to many social issues on the parliamentary agenda.
We are discussing youth unemployment, which is largely an urban issue. Answers to this challenge are few given a stunted private sector and a zero-growth-policy-adopting civil service. The government’s much parroted answer to educated, unemployed youth is: Go back to your village and become an “educated farmer.” Where? To the village where the little farmland is ravaged by marauding animals and one goes hungry? To the village where the land is surveyed and re-surveyed and re-resurveyed and the excess land is seized or compensation demanded? To the village that is three days away from the nearest motor road? To the village where unending toil behind a pair of oxen rewards one a povertystricken life? How many of our Dashos, who delight in the concept of educated farmers, would like their universityeducated sons and daughters to go back to the village?
The unemployment problem today is compounded by village folk trying to escape rural drudgery and chase an urban dream that is a distant mirage. They float around, nameless and faceless. But they don’t want to go back to their village and soil their hands. For them and their educated cousins, life becomes anchorless. Many of them then become the dregs of society: thieves, robbers, rapists, drug addicts, prostitutes, murderers. Where has the rain started beating them?
Increasingly, our village houses are being deserted and farmlands left fallow. Labour shortage has become a harsh reality. Despite a rule curbing urban schools’ enrolling rural children, urban schools are bursting at their seams because of rural children studying with their urban relatives. All this is because urban development offers them ease of life. In the eyes of our rural people, our urban centres are the northern star, bright, big and tantalising. Go to a village and come back to the town, and you will see the difference. Our policy of balanced and equitable socio-economic development flew out the window a long time ago and now exists only on paper.
If the insatiable urban need is not curbed by rural necessity, the gaping divide will fuel rural-urban migration. This, in turn, will increase unemployment, intensify crime, put pressure on urban social amenities, and dilute traditional culture, not to mention a host of other problems. Stopping, or at least curbing, rural-urban migration could be an answer to many such social problems.
Curbing rural-urban migration doesn’t necessarily require building monstrous structures for the rural folk. Simply take them into account when you make development plans. Give them their share. They will remain there.
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what..? are you afraid of the rural peoples coming to urban and take your share of
cake..?
Beautifully put. One line that needs be magnified to such an extent, our policy makers will see it clearly is this one: Our policy of balanced and equitable socio-economic development flew out the window a long time ago and now exists only on paper.
I may sound communal or dissentful, but the truth is, the backward regions have always remained in scarcity of devleopment, while the ones that are flourishing are flourshing in leaps in bounds. I won’t drop the names-but EAST is EAST and WEST is WEST! the two wont meet!
Honestly I have not seen many rural parts of Bhutan, but my own village, is an example good enough.
Now I am also illegitimately a seed of rural-urban migration that happend sometimes in the 70s when my dad landed a job in the government. he never went back. why should he?
He built a house, he raised our family, educated us and in his own words-he gave us possibly a good life. And Now I have got a job and I am not going there either. Why should I?
My mother’s younger brother left high school. Thought he would help his aging parents and his elder sisters, who work in the fields. He was the only son in the family but he refused to go back to the field. He became a driver. And now he plans to buy a Alto and drive a taxi. Why did not he go back? why should he go back either?
I have a cousin who came to Thimphu as a guide to his old parents. That was the first time he had a brush with modern life style. And this taste and longing would bring him back to Thimphu. Today he is a driver too, with a family, and a huge on at tht.
That way-A village in the east is on the verge of being lost.
Sorry folks, but the government had skewed the balnced regional growth. The story is better not told. Rural-urban migration will not cease but increase in years to come. Our MPs, now that rural votes count, should frame policies that will refrain, if not attract them to rural bhutan, from migrating.
Road, electricity, and better health care-give them a little more. They will stay there. because My grand parents still cannot get used to town life. They are happy where they are. because these are the people who feel genuinely that home is not just about comfort, but a place that they truly belong to. And that is where we all belong!