Ghost villages

Rural-urban migration is the movement of people from the countryside to the city, or from the villages to the towns in our context. Rural to urban migration causes growth of towns and cities, expanding and covering a greater area of land. It leads to urbanization, an increasing proportion of people living in towns and cities. Lack of employment opportunities, low wages, drought, lack of basic amenities, children’s education and other social factors act as push factors and more employment opportunities, higher income, better wages, and better schooling and healthcare facilities as pull factors causing the rural to urban migration. Every year, hundreds or even thousands of people move to the towns from our villages. Many village dwellers eventually migrate to towns, primarily Dimapur and Mokokchung, because the rural areas they leave have many push factors and the town has lots of pull factors. As the number of urban dwellers increase, the negative effects such as depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution, earning disparities, redundancy, unplanned urban expansion, social unrest, and population crowding are bound to happen.

There are many causes of rural-urban migration. People naturally will want to escape hardship, which is why they migrate to the urban areas seeking a better life. Family reunification is another common reason as more and more elderly families migrate to the towns where their children are settled. There are also economic reasons that push the rural-urban migration. As long as there is no equitable development, it is feared that rural-urban migration will continue to happen. No doubt, there are benefits of rural-urban migration. The movement of people out of agriculture and into other sectors with higher productivity – like manufacturing and services, mostly located in urban areas – contributes to economic growth and higher incomes for migrants from rural areas. It can boost productivity and economic development.

However, on the other hand, rural-urban migration poses some critical questions. With more and more people from the villages migrating to towns and urban areas year after year, the villages are becoming more like ghost villages. The negative impacts of dwindling population in our villages are already being felt. So many of our cultural heritage and traditional values are on the verge of being lost forever because there are no people to preserve or practice them. Our villages are supposed to be our repository of indigenous knowledge and heritage. Sadly, that notion is being challenged today because the ‘keepers’ are now very few in number. Although there is no official record, it is said that the number of deaths are higher than the number of births in most of the villages these days. The elderly population in the villages will naturally pass on and the younger population are always on the lookout for opportunities to migrate to the urban areas for aforementioned reasons and quite understandably so. This rural-urban migration, if not corrected, is going to be a bigger problem for indigenous communities like ourselves in the near future.

One key strategy for mitigating rural-urban migration is the promotion of effective local economic development programs and activities in the villages along with decentralization of governance. However, how the strategy is being effectively implemented is another issue altogether. Development in the rural areas would help create new jobs, help communities retain existing jobs, and thus reduce rural-urban migration – at least theoretically. What remains to be seen is whether we can practically implement that.