Asia-Pacific Population Journal - Volume 5, Issue 3, 1990

Nepal is entering the 1990s with a new political system. A democratically elected Government will be in office within a year’s time and one of its first tasks will be to define a fresh development strategy for the country to deal with old problems. Prominent among these are challenging population problems: a high population growth rate, heavy migration of people moving form over-exploited terraces in the mountains and hills towards an almost saturated agricultural frontier in the terai (lowlands near the border with India), scattered population settlements in most of the rural areas which make it difficult and costly to provide them with basic infrastructure and services, and an explosive growth of most of the still incipient urban centres in the country.

In recent decades, many third world countries have been experiencing rapid rates of urbanization resulting in an explosion in the siae of their urban population. China, however, has been a striking exception to the general patterns. The Government of China has intervened in order to keep the process of urbanization under control. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the Government has taken measures to control gradually the rapid growth of population and to regulate by various means the increase of the urban population and the level of urbanization. The low level of urbanization in China has thus been well recognized in recent studies of the demographic, geographic, social and economic development of this country (Chen, 1973; Thompson, 1975; Chang, 1976; Chiu, 1980; Yeh and Xu, 1984; Chen, 1988).

Various types of disturbances in Pakistan’s large cities c luring last three years or so have raised many questions about the future. Although administrators are currently taking steps to forestall similar mishaps in the future, industrialists and businessmen are worried about the colossal loss of manhours and production. In addition, demographers and social planners are questioning the wisdom of allowing large cities to grow to uncontrollable dimensions.