As you might expect, the remittance village is punctuated by smooth, concrete houses rising among their weary-looking brick, mud and bamboo neighbours, a settlement where shiny motorcycles whine back and forth.
But in the remittance village you will also find residents who cannot even afford the price of a flight ticket to join the growing queue of fellow villagers trooping overseas to earn. It is also a place where going to work abroad actually drives some households into poverty instead of lifting them out of it.
This is why author Ramesh Sunam’s book, Transnational Labour Migration, Livelihoods and Agrarian Change in Nepal: The Remittance Village is so valuable. It precisely details the economic, sociocultural and even political forces that shape the livelihoods of rural people, among which is transnational labour migration (TLM) whose earnings are sent home as remittances.
That cash has largely propped up Nepal’s economy in recent decades, at one point making up about one-third of GDP. Today it is about 25% and at any given time, 1 in 5 working age Nepalis is overseas for work. A recent World Bank report ranked Nepal as the largest remittance-receiving country in South Asia and the fifth largest in the world as a share of GDP.
Pre-Covid, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimated that 164 million people were officially working outside their home countries although, notes Sunam, the actual figures would be much higher with the inclusion of ‘undocumented’ migrants. A little over 40% of those migrant workers were women.
Spotlighting the people and livelihoods of Panchayan village of Sunsari District in Province 2, situated between Dharan and Itahari, The Remittance Village is based on field work that Sunam did between January 2012 and February 2013.
An academic endeavour, the book can be challenging for non-specialists. But Sunam, an assistant professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, at Waseda University in Tokyo, clearly and consistently signposts and summarises the contents of each chapter of this compact read. The insights generated will be useful for anyone who wants to better understand one of the key economic drivers and policy issues of today’s Nepal, particularly with labour migration threatened by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Sunam concludes that various factors — including of course crossborder migration — are weakening the bonds between villagers and the land, but that the same cannot be said for the poorest rural residents, for whom working the fields remains a key step in the climb out of poverty.
He writes: ‘TLM does offer a pathway out of poverty: over two-thirds of migrant households changed their status from being poor to non-poor in this way. It is, however, important to highlight that these households became successful through a diversification strategy by combining migration with other farm and non-farm pursuits.’
Sunam tells the story of Aman Chaudhari, who spent four years working in a garment factory in Dubai to try and better the lot of his family. Meanwhile, his wife Mena continued sharecropping in farmers’ fields in Panchayan, also working as a wage labourer on villagers’ farms. After Aman returned, they built a house on a small plot of land bought with his remittances, sent their children to a private school, and vowed that Aman would not migrate again to work.
