Let us not forget the countryside
ALL through last week, homebound people left the capital city in droves to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr in their country homes. And how the capital as well as other bigger cities of Bangladesh depend on the countryside for their verve and sparkle one can understand on such big socio-religious occasions such as Eid. Though the city's older residents often curse the influx of fresh invaders from the districts who are responsible for its ever-swelling population, its intolerable traffic jams and everything that annoys them, it is also the people from the countryside that keep the city going. The city-ward migrants who swarm the slums and the footpaths are not purely an object of vexation, for they also supply the factories, the households and the markets with their necessary workforce. The expanding city needs enough working hands and the migrants their work. So, they both serve one another. Ideally, the relationship between the city and the rural backyard should have been mutually beneficial, a win-win one. Unfortunately, in the case of the capital and other big cities of Bangladesh, it is rather a lose-lose situation as it is also destroying the demographic and ecological balance of the cities.
It is not only the impoverished people who are racing towards the cities in growing numbers in search of livelihood. Members of the section of society belonging to the middle class and lower middle class, youths in particular, are also joining the ranks of the army of semi-employed and unemployed multitude.
The city-bound march of rural migrants is getting longer and wider by the day. The reason as everyone knows is that there are fewer opportunities of work back home in the villages. As a consequence, the villages, which were once self-sufficient, are losing their attraction, while the cities and towns, big or small, are bursting at the seams with more people than they are able to support, far less provide them with work.
If the village has no work to provide to its adult and able population and a city has more job-seekers than it can handle, then that is the worst kind of predicament for the nation. Because, it is rendering both the city and the country poorer.
This process of pauperisation of the countryside and the swelling of the cities at their expense has been going on for long. The capital in particular has been absorbing the lion's share of the city bound migrants. The situation has reached explosive proportions a long time back.
It is not that the government and all others concerned are not worried about this development. They apparently are, though, nothing of consequence has so far been done to reverse this dangerous trend.
Of late the authorities have become more concerned with the city's traffic jams. Naturally, ideas are being floated to resolve this problem through various novel means. Creation of more traffic space through efficient management of the traffic load among the different kinds of road users according to priority may be one of the ways under the given conditions. Construction of more flyovers is on the agenda. Ideas like introduction of new kinds of transport services such as monorails, sky trains and metro rail service are also doing the rounds. These are undoubtedly cost-intensive projects. But for a modern city like Dhaka, one will have to go for such options, today or tomorrow. To deny this would be tantamount to saying that one does not want progress.
We are certainly for progress. But what kind of progress have we so far been craving and at what cost? We have been making the cities more glamorous at the expense of countryside. The capital city of Dhaka, for example, houses not only the administrative headquarters, but also the major businesses and the industries. But all these could well be distributed over different parts of the country, thereby reducing all the pressure on a single spot like the capital city.
Progress does not consist only in building big concrete and metallic behemoths in the cities. On the contrary, the condition of progress is better reflected through the faces of people beaming with happiness, who are healthy, better clothed, have work, protected by a roof over their head and whose children can go to school.
To make bigger cities more liveable, it will be necessary to transfer some of its resources to the countryside. That will go a long way towards resolving the major problems the big cities are now facing as well as help addressing some of economic ills of the country including its poverty.
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