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

The Remake of a Statemodalities of state building should incorporate this sentiment in both theemergency and longer stabilisation phase.On the other hand, the poorest of the poor, around 20 per cent of total,may not have access to network or resources to even go to India. Butthose who go to Gulf States and Malaysia remit almost 100 per cent of themoney they save precisely because they cannot keep money indefinitelythere. And figures show that these people who go to Gulf States andSouth East Asia are the ones who have been sustaining Nepaleseeconomy. Remittances from Gulf accounted for almost 75 per cent of totalremittance for Nepal (Khatri 2007). However there are other dimensionsof these migrants we have forgotten. By categorising them as less skilled,we have misunderstood the dynamic nature of the flow of knowledge,skill and acquisition. By bundling them into a box of unskilled labour forceand closing the lid of the box thereafter, we have been closing our eyes towhat new development takes place in their capacity as human resources.This belief that they cannot gain anything goes against the many researchbasedevidence of sociological understanding. It has been proved thatthere is a dual relationship between individual as a subject and societyas a structure in which daily practices of livelihoods of subject takeplace. Sociological theories have proved that the structure of the societydetermines the disposition of human as individuals who occupy positionwithin it as much as the human being can influence the structure. So, toassume that the labour migrants cannot gain any form of new knowledgeand skill in the migration process and in the destination country is nottrue. In the context of the Nepal, it has not seen how this new knowledgeget localised and how it is used for local positive outcomes.A controversy surrounding remittance is its impact on inequality. Ampleexamples can be cited on both ends of the debate. But the final conclusiondepends upon a host of criteria used to evaluate the debate: some ofthem being time frame, location, type of inequality etc. (Khatri 2007).A study in Bangladesh reveals that though migration could increaseinequality between well to do and very poor within the village of origin, ithas decreased inequality between traditionally rich people in the villagesand the many poorer households that had opportunities to earn moneyabroad. This has also resulted in changing of perception of the traditionallyrich people towards the poorer. It has also opened different avenues ofintegration between the rich and the poor (for example, through trademade possible by opening shops by remitted money, friendship betweenchildren and thus between houses as the children of migrants household179