Rural-urban boundaries

It is time to re-evaluate them

The area Nadeem used to live in was a large village or small town once, not many years ago. There was no decent school or medical facility in the area. Communication with the larger city was difficult, the roads poor and the means of transportation difficult to access and expensive. But things have changed rapidly in the last couple of decades.

Today his house is connected to the world through mobile phones, which everyone in the household has and uses frequently. They have cable television through a local provider. FM radio brings the latest songs from around the world into the household. They have broadband access through the Internet provider and when that does not work, they have access through pre-paid Internet access cards.

Their area now has paved roads and even public transport to the larger nearby city is widely available. But the area has decent schools and health facilities, and though for universities and more serious health issues people still have to travel to the city, the day-to-day activities do not require them to leave the area much. But interestingly, given the government’s administrative classification, from prior to local government changes of 2001, the area is still classified as a rural area of the Punjab. Clearly our rural-urban distinction is outmoded. It was based on the notion of where we had town committees and so on, based on dated population and administrative structures. One hears that according to this classification even some areas around Defence Housing Authority in Lahore, like where LUMS is now, are classified as rural. Given the infrastructure of the area, there is no sensible definition of rural-urban under which we can classify that area as rural.

The last couple of decades have changed Pakistan a lot. Large areas of the Punjab, especially in the Central and Northern parts, areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and areas surrounding Karachi, Hyderabad and other larger towns of Sindh, have seen the economy, infrastructure and living undergo significant changes, similar to ones described above about Nadeem’s neighbourhood. These are not reflected in our official statistics and even our societal discussions/debates. We continue to say Pakistan is an agricultural economy, where 70 odd percent of the population still lives in rural areas. This is important because then we expect the government to plan and execute development on the basis of this reality and expectations that follow. But this might not be what the government should be doing. We might need a more thought through strategy which takes into account the needs of urban areas directly, especially the newly urbanised areas and populations, and balance governmental policies in light of the new reality.

If we do change the older definitions and reclassify areas as rural or urban on the basis of statistics like size of population, population density (high in urban areas), access to infrastructure, time and cost of accessing larger urban areas etc., the relevant basis for such classification can be worked out fairly easily by relevant experts/policy makers, my feeling, and this is just based on what I have seen/read recently, is we could have our urban population percentage going up by as much as 10 odd percent to a ball park of around 40 percent as urban. That would mean a significant rethinking of how we think of Pakistan, our economy, and our developmental needs.

Here is an example to bring this home. If a large village/small town has developed enough, in the ways mentioned above, then its developmental needs are not just going to be about access to water for agriculture, roads for farm to market connections and access to electricity for agricultural purposes. The town is going to need planning for further expansion, it will need public water and waste removal systems. It will need electricity grids and connection to the gas pipeline system. It will need to plan for not only needed schools and BHUs/RHCs but colleges and larger and more specialized hospitals. Town planners will need to determine where private schools/colleges should go, where trade/commerce should concentrate and so on: everything that a town/city needs to think through to make it a liveable space.

At the larger level we will have to think through what this means for the development strategy of the country. Can these towns/cities be hubs of growth for the economy? The new growth strategy that Planning Commission has put together definitely thinks so. It would be great if we could have solid statistics to back that thinking. If we find that a significant proportion of populations of these areas, say fifty or sixty percent, are no longer dependent, primarily, on agriculture for their income, or do not take agriculture to be their primary source of income/occupation, we will need to figure out which areas of agribusiness, industry, trade and commerce can flourish in the area. Infrastructure development and vocational training programmes etc would have to be tailored to match the requirements of the area.

Though the commitment of some of the political parties, organised more for provincial and national politics, regarding devolution to local levels is a bit shaky still, there is broad realization that this will have to be done sooner or later. Though sooner would be better of course. But this fits in well with what is being said. The various urban areas that have developed recently or are developing will need detailed planning for infrastructure as well as for all other development needs mentioned. This cannot be done from any provincial capital hundreds of miles and light-years of thinking away and with very different politics as well. The local governments will need to develop and if they do, they will be in the best position to organize for local development. The earlier we realise this, the better for our national growth/development effort.

Take a road trip across central/northern Punjab or some of the South Western regions of Kyber Pakhtunkhwa. They do not give the look of rural areas anymore. And they are not. There are quite a few such areas in Pakistan now. We still keep thinking of them as rural areas due to older ways of thinking. This thinking needs updating as it is costing us, in terms of not only organizing better facilities, especially infrastructure, for the people in these areas, but in terms of developmental and growth opportunities too. These areas might not need agricultural incentives anymore, but more finely calibrated ones for industrial and trade development. At the very least we need to update our ways of thinking and classification to reflect the changing and changed reality of Pakistan.

The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at [email protected]