English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

The Remake of a StateThe socio-economic situation that produced migration in the first placeis still prevalent. Despite the peace agreement, the benchmark to peace,and following the election to the CA focus to the forward the countrytowards recovery, situations still remain such that the country is strugglingtowards restoration of a sound political and economic situation. If we lookat the voice of migrants, then as raised by Giacconi (Brinkerhoff 2005), wewill still not be able to provide sound walls to our painters in a very recentfuture. Thus we cannot assume that migration will pace down soon.Besides this, studies have found that migration mostly happens due tounequal distribution of opportunities. This for us means that migrationwill be an integral part of Nepalese socio-economy even if it only meansgoing to India or the Arab countries. This is because Nepal is not in aposition to compete with the opportunities they provide. Moreover, asdiscussed prior to this paragraph, Nepal has a growing trend of migrationfor educational and career enhancement purpose. This is also a partwhere Nepal needs to recover against, else countries like the UK and theUS will still lure Nepali students and professionals due to the high value ofthe academic certificates of those countries in the Nepali labour marketas well as other implicit knowledge and skills, even if not for the overallsound academic and professionalism that these countries promise.In addition, migration is found to be embedded in the life cycle of peoplein some areas of Nepal. Studies in the far west of Nepal (Thieme 2006;Sharma 2008) show that being a migrant and working in India is a part ofmale life cycle. It is assumed that this migration in the life of youth has asocial status that is better than the non-migrant male. Here migration toIndia is taken as a step in becoming a ‘man’.In such cases where migration is culturally engrained and has primaryimportance over the pull-push forces centred on economic discussionsin migration, migration cannot be stopped suddenly by improving theeconomic and political situations even if it were to improve in the firstplace. Besides this, to the migrants of the western region of Nepal, due toprevious history of migration, the cities to India are far more nearer andhold networks than the main urban centres within Nepal. In an answerto why he chose going to India, over cities within Nepal- like Kathmandu,an IDP who was working in India, said that the capital city of the countryto them was like China. “Kathmandu to us is like China. We have noconnections there and it is very far from our place. India is nearer, moreaccessible and Nepalese have our neighbours and other kins who havebeen living in India”. 6 Thus, we can see that what we term as migration to6Personal interview with one of the authors in Nepalgunj, September 2007.175