Last month, at the launch of an occasional magazine Sankathan, whose first issue was called “Gaun-Sahar”, eminent sociology professor Chaitanya Mishra said Nepal is not a country of villages anymore. For the Nepalis who like to live with the nostalgia of village life, Mishra’s statement could come as a crude reminder of our current reality, if not a shock altogether. So, for the nostalgic lot, Tourism Minister Sudan Kirati’s statement earlier this week that he is working on a plan to turn around 60 of Nepal’s villages into “heritage villages” should bring a sigh of relief. But turning ghost villages into boutique tourist destinations is easier said than done. Thankfully, the minister did not talk about rejuvenating all of Nepal’s villages, as leaders often do to go ‘viral’.

Over 66 percent of Nepalis now live in urban areas, although this data could be misleading as urban settlements now encompass municipalities. As is well known, thousands of villages that cannot actually be called “urban” were incorporated into municipalities after state restructuring in 2015. Be that as it may, the villages as we know them are turning into ghost villages due to massive out-migration in the past couple of decades. As per the 2021 census, over 2.1 million Nepali citizens live outside the country. The exact number could be higher, as census figures often do not incorporate the massive number of Nepalis who travel to India for seasonal work. Even more Nepalis have migrated from rural to urban areas—from the hills to the Tarai—leading to a negative population growth in 32 of the country’s 77 districts. Almost 54 percent of Nepal’s population now lives in the Tarai, 40 percent in the hills and the remaining 6 percent in the higher mountains.

The fact that the rural-urban shift seems to be the natural direction of the flow of people in the modern age is well established. People often always change their habitats for better opportunities. Nepal’s history of migration is not too different from this seemingly natural flow, which has been going on through the centuries. But the past three decades are especially significant, not just because they are recent but because they highlight a certain rupture in Nepal’s history. First came the Maoist insurgency, which made it impossible for thousands of people to live in the villages as the guerrillas targeted the well-off families. With life coming to a standstill, even those not directly affected by the conflict found it safe to head to the urban areas. Then came the awakening among the people that they could abandon the hardships their ancestors had readily adopted and chase a better life, in urban settlements and increasingly, abroad. As of today, entire villages lie empty, devoid of most of their erstwhile residents.

Time has come for our leaders to seriously think about long-term national plans in order to lure people back into the hundreds of rustic villages that make Nepal. Otherwise, trying to build a handful of boutique settlements when hundreds of other villages run out of people, cultures, traditions, and histories will be akin to burning a house for a fistful of ash. Our political class will have to be more imaginative than that.

Published on: 19 January 2024 | The Kathmandu Post