By
Gardiner Harris
 |
Young Nepalis line up to file South Korean job applications in
Over 300,000 young people leave the country each year to find work, much of it
backbreaking labor.CreditNarendra Shrestha/European Pressphoto Agency
|
Now, at least five turn up daily, the bodies shoehorned
into white plastic-wrapped boxes. So, in 2009, Dipendra Prasad Acharya quit his
job driving trucks to work full time in one of Nepal
Mr. Acharya knows that his job is assured. At each
pickup, he navigates around hordes of rangy young Nepali men and a growing
number of women who mob the second-class departure terminal — some of whom are
bound to return shrink-wrapped.
“The number of dead bodies keeps increasing,” he said,
waiting for another coffin. “We ferry the dead to their home villages free of
cost. The government pays me for my work.”
With few jobs at home, the country’s youths have
responded by leaving. The scale of emigration has astonished development
economists, yet it continues to grow, increasing 37 percent in just the past
two years.
On average, about 1,500 Nepalis officially left for jobs
abroad each day in the 2014 fiscal year, up from six in 1996. Even more are
thought to have left unofficially for India
No country in the world with at least 10 million people
earns a greater share of its wealth from emigrant workers. Nepal
The
flood of foreign money — officially 25 percent of Nepal ’s gross domestic product and unofficially as much as 40
percent — is rapidly transforming the country’s economy and culture. Sturdy
brick homes now dot villages where only mud huts stood. Private schools
flourish. With their husbands gone to work abroad, women venture from home more
frequently, make more family decisions and have fewer babies.
“People that have come from abroad are more punctual,”
said Ganesh Gurung, a sociologist at the Nepal
Institute of Development Studies. “They don’t spit as much in public
places.”
But backbreaking labor in Kuwait , Malaysia , Qatar and Saudi Arabia , the most popular destinations outside of neighboring India , has resulted in a troubling number of deaths. An investigation last year by the British newspaper The Guardian
said that Nepalis were being used as slaves in Qatar to build facilities for the 2022 World Cup, and
returnees have been found to have higher rates of H.I.V. and AIDS.
Still, in dozens of interviews, many of those who
returned from the Middle East praised the working conditions there, though many also
complained about poor living conditions and delays in getting paid. (A recent survey of Nepali migrant workers found that a
quarter returned home because employers violated contracts, and female domestic
workers in particular complained about excessive hours.)
“Before I went to Qatar , I’d never worked with safety equipment like safety
belts and helmets and steel-toed shoes,” Kaplesh Mandal, a 30-year-old laborer,
said in comments that were echoed by other men. “And there is traffic regulation.
If we could get that here in Nepal , that would be really good.”
Migrants have transformed Katmandu , the jumping-off point for most official migration.
Between 2001 and 2011, the city’s population grew 61 percent, to 1.7 million,
while the country’s rose 14 percent, to about 26.5 million. Hundreds line up
every day at the Narayanhiti Palace
But no place has changed as much as the Dhanusha
District, an agricultural region along the Indian border with low incomes and
the highest share of
emigrants’ families in
the country. Much of the land is devoted to rice paddies, and yoked oxen are
still the most common means of plowing.
Janakpur, the district
capital, is a fetid warren of potholed streets, with some piled so high with
rubble that they resemble a war zone. Roads outside the capital are largely
dirt tracks over which vehicles rarely travel more than 15 miles per hour and
people defecate openly throughout the day.
But hope has come to Dhanusha
in the form of solid homes, a proliferation of radios and TVs, and good schools.
There are also more bars for men who developed a taste for alcohol while
abroad.
In 2007, Madan Deuba opened the Siddhartha English Boarding
School
“Nearly all of the money I get comes from fathers and
uncles who are working in Qatar or Saudi Arabia ,” he said in an interview.
He has 11 teachers, and his students sprang to their feet
when he entered classrooms. “Afternoon, sir,” the children sang in unison.
Fewer than half of Dhanusha’s adults can read, but the
district’s emigrants invest substantially more in education than nonemigrants,
a study found. Mr. Deuba said that his goal was to ready students for jobs
abroad, although he said he never considered teaching Arabic.
A few blocks away, Munesa Khatun lived in a half-built
brick home that her husband planned to finish when he returned from Saudi Arabia . But he died in that country. Now, one of their two sons
works in Qatar and the other is waiting for a visa to join him, she
said.
“I’m very frightened for my son because I don’t want him
to die over there like his father,” Ms. Khatun said. “But we need money, and there
is no other way to get it.”
Indeed, while foreign jobs have eased Nepal’s endemic
poverty, they may be creating a vicious cycle that forces more and more people
to leave by keeping the country’s currency and inflation high while hurting
domestic production. Imports have surged, and little of the infrastructure
needed for domestic growth has been built. Development economists are worried that
Nepal ’s lifeline may strangle it, either slowly or quite
suddenly.
“If something were to happen in the gulf that affected
the migration flow, Nepal would explode,” said Chandan Sapkota, an economist at
the Asian Development Bank.
“And neither policy makers, intelligence agencies nor the government here has
any idea what to do about it.”
