Empty villages, crowded cities

VIETNAM IS STRUGGLING WITH A CRISIS OF INTERNAL MIGRATION

When Vu Thi Linh moved her family from their spacious rural home to a tiny rented room in Hanoi, she hoped her children would be able to get the education she never had.

The Linhs are among hundreds of thousands of people moving to Vietnam’s bulging capital and southern Ho Chi Minh City every year, part of what the World Bank says is one of the fastest rates of urbanisation in Asia.

But as economic growth accelerates, Vietnam’s cities are struggling to cope with the huge numbers of people abandoning the grind of country life, while only the elderly and the young are left in the villages. Linh moved to Hanoi in June after her two daughters won a place at a university in the capital.

“I didn’t think life in the city was exciting, but because of my children’s future, I’ve had to change my opinion,” she said.

“They have become more educated and now they don’t want to come back to live in the countryside.”

Since decades of war ended in 1975, Vietnam has developed rapidly from an impoverished nation plagued by food shortages to a middle-income country and World Trade Organisation member. Despite lingering issues in the banking and state-run sector, gross domestic product (GDP) is growing faster than expected this year and analysts say Vietnam is one of the only countries in Southeast Asian with swiftly rising exports.

Some 70 per cent of the 90 million-strong population still lives off farming in rural areas, but top party leaders have said they want a “modern and industrialised nation by 2035”.

Many move to the cities to work in export-oriented manufacturing

Few regrets

Le Van Mung moved to Hanoi a decade ago and has few regrets.

“Life in the countryside is too hard. We cannot make much money and we have to work really hard in the fields,” he said.

Originally from northern Ha Nam province, Mung now works as an electrician and his wife runs a small restaurant. Together they earn some $600 a month

“There are more well-paying jobs and opportunities than in the countryside,” said Dang Nguyen Anh, director of Vietnam’s Institute of Sociology in Hanoi. Moreover, younger generations have turned their back on the traditional rural lifestyle.

“It is difficult to resist the attraction of city life,” Anh said.

Officials say around 100,000 people move to the capital every year and some 130,000 move to Ho Chi Minh City. For a country where the phrase “go home” translates literally to “go back to the countryside”, this is a major transformation.

Strain on system

The new arrivals — mostly students and unskilled workers — bring benefits, but also put “pressure on culture, education, traffic, health care,” said Hanoi city official Pham Van Thanh.

Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have been struggling to build enough infrastructure — roads, water supplies and drainage can hardly keep pace with the cities’ growth. Traffic congestion has become a major issue, while schools and hospitals are overloaded, experts say.

In Ho Chi Minh City, some 85,000 new pupils enter the schooling system each year and, in some areas, up to half of these may be from other provinces.

Vietnam has a household registration system which makes it more difficult for new arrivals to access free schooling and health care in the cities — although widespread corruption means there are ways around this.

Authorities make “no effort to minimise the number of migrants,” Hanoi official Thanh said. But this is also hurting rural areas. Whole swaths of the countryside are now made up of the elderly and the very young — with all the working-age adults heading to major cities or industrial zones.