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IT may be true that cities are the engine of growth, but Pakistan’s obsession with urban development is restricting space for the discourse on rural development.
It is not that rural development never took centre stage in Pakistan’s public policy. Starting from village aid programmes and the green revolution of the ’50s and ’60s, this area was once the darling of politicians and the bureaucracy alike.
Rural development was pursued as a cornerstone of development in a traditionally agrarian society and was given its due place in the governance agenda. The development portfolios of the federal, provincial and local governments invariably carried a robust share for rural development initiatives.
As late as 1979, policymakers appeared fully cognisant of the importance of preserving the health of rural areas, as is evident from the provisions of the Local Government Ordinance 1979. This provided a two-tiered institutional mechanism for taking care of rural development through union councils and district councils.
Both these institutions comprised exclusively rural areas in each district and catered for localised as well as large-scale development requirements. A substantial chunk of resources for localised development ended up in rural areas as a consequence of these design features.
However, urbanisation in the ’80s and ’90s conclusively put the urban question centre stage in the governance and development discourse. The emergence of political parties in Sindh and Punjab with a predominantly urban orientation can be viewed as evidence of the ascendancy of the urban over the rural.
But more than the emergence of political forces with a major urban tilt, the overall drift of economic development and industrial growth was of a nature that favoured an urban bias. The emergence of mega-cities (Lahore, Karachi and Faisalabad) and many intermediate cities across the country started acting as a huge pull-factor for increasing urbanisation.
The LGO 2001 dealt the final blow through the introduction of the notion ‘ending the urban-rural divide’. Almost unwittingly, this component of the LGO 2001 deprived the rural areas of their identity as they ended up being clubbed together with urban and peri-urban areas under the rubric of tehsil municipal administration.
Apparently, the objective of this innovation was to introduce equity of developmental treatment for urban and rural areas. However, in actual practice, it led to a situation where the particular developmental needs of rural areas were ignored, hastening the process of rural degradation. In some provinces, the term ‘rural development’ was removed from the nomenclature of local government departments.
While undertaking settlement in the early part of the last century, the British came up with the wonderful idea of establishing settled villages, or chaks. Each of these villages followed a specific pattern in terms of living areas, streets, dedicated land for common facilities, the village pond and so on. In effect, each village catered to nearly all the civic requirements of the inhabitants.
Any of these chaks today is a complete distortion of village planning: the common-use areas are gobbled up, there are street encroachments, and sanitary conditions are pathetic. By and large, this degeneration has resulted from decades of negligence of village development and rural growth.
The damage to rural areas is not confined to people’s living conditions. Agriculture — still the backbone of our rural economy — has also suffered on account of many policies that have entailed acts of omission and commission. Faulty land-use regulation has allowed unscrupulous land developers to convert agricultural land near urban centres into housing schemes. These agricultural lands were traditionally used for growing vegetables and other cash crops. Other agricultural policies pertaining to zoning regimes, subsidy frameworks for various crops, agricultural input costing, etc, have also been impervious to the legitimate concerns of farming communities.
Leaving aside the non-governmental sector, including indigenous citizens’ institutions such as village organisations, rural support programme networks and local support organisations, it is hard to find any concerted effort aimed at rejuvenating rural development these days.
Left on their own, many rural areas are developing into distorted caricatures of urban slums, forcing huge chunks of the rural population into urban migration. Once in cities, these rural communities tend to concentrate in unplanned peri-urban areas, constraining urban service networks and aggravating the already advanced process of urban decay. As a result, even the urban areas are not spared the negative fallout.
It is critical to bring the rural development agenda back into the focus of development policies. The revival of the local governance system in the near future is the right time for this intervention.
The writer is a public policy expert.
