The hardships of economic migration

The breeze in the afternoon blows gently through the basement of Grandma Kham's house, but it is just too cool for the girl who is now sleeping under a thick blanket with a high fever.

Afraid that her granddaughter's condition will worsen, Mrs Kham wraps the blanket around her more tightly.

Mrs Kham has hardly slept for over 24 hours. The girl, three-year-old Princess, cried for her mother all night, but her mother had to return Bangkok for work days earlier.

"You see how much weight I've lost looking after my grandchildren," said Mrs Kham, who turns 72 this year.

Mrs Kham, a resident of Phayao province in the North, is not the only senior citizen in rural Thailand who, rather than enjoying a peaceful retirement, has had to return to work and look after children.

Although there are no exact figures showing the number of rural households where senior citizens are looking after their children's children, situations like Mrs Kham's have been reported widely, reflecting the prevalence of the arrangement.

In Phayao, where economic migration remains high because there are few jobs available except for work on farms, in roughly 6% - about 160,000 - of the total households, the elderly live either alone or with their grandchildren. The provincial health office is worried about the health care of the residents of these households.

Professor Bhassorn Limanonda, dean of Chulalongkorn University's Population Studies College, says that when the subject of migration comes up, the issue that catches the attention of the public or policy-makers tends to be the plight of illegal immigrants, who leave home to find themselves suffering in a foreign land.

It is only recently that the difficulties of the elderly left to live alone in rural areas have been highlighted, as people have become more concerned about our ageing society, Ms Bhassorn said.

"Internal migration certainly has an impact on the family structure in rural areas, and especially on the elderly and the children. But we tend to focus more on other immediate and serious issues like illegal immigrants." she said. "Hardly anything has changed to improve the internal migration situation, despite the fact that it has continued for many years and is still prevalent in much of the country."

According to Ms Bhassorn, social aspects of the country's development were addressed in national economic and social development plans much later than the economic aspects.

The impact of migration from rural to urban areas only began to receive attention in the fourth five-year plan, formulated around 1977. At the time the income gap between urban and rural areas was showing signs of growing wider, reflecting the uneven distribution of development and growth between rural and urban areas.

As part of the plan, work began on developing new urban areas in key regions in an effort to help attract migrants to return home. However, this failed to arrest the continued migration to established cities - especially Bangkok - where people sought better job opportunities.

In the report "The Analysis of the Change of the Population Structure and Impact on the Country's Development", published in September by the National Social and Economic Development Board Office, it was noted that it was not until the fifth five-year plan that the trend of rural to urban migration began to slow.

There were about 2.18 million people per year still migrating from rural areas in 2006, with most leaving the Northeast. In the North, the area with the third highest migration, about 400,000 left the region.

Economic migration to Bangkok and its outskirts is still prevalent, as is migration to the Eastern Seaboard industrial region.

The report notes that although these people might improve their economic circumstances, their migration has created a "skipped family" in which their parents and their children are living together. This, the report notes, may undermine traditional family bonds.

Mrs Kham saw her youngest daughter, Sakuna, now 35, and her older sister Tui, now 37, leave home in their teens to find better educational opportunities.

The farming family could not afford to support the girls' education, so they left home to find jobs in Bangkok. Ms Sakuna studied at a vocational school and eventually got a job as an accountant. She has never been back home to work, only to visit.

Ms Tui pursued her studies at Ramkhamhaeng University and worked part-time in a department store. In her final year, she dropped out.

"I just felt exhausted and lost all the determination I once had," she said.

She then started work full-time and got a job as a cashier in a restaurant, which is where she met her husband. They lived together in a small one-room apartment for five years before deciding to get married. The couple had a baby, Nong Pote.

Ms Sakuna also got engaged, and eight years later she had a daughter, Princess.

Neither baby lived with her parents for long. When both were about five months old, they were sent home to live with Mrs Kham.

Ms Tui says one of the reasons she was unable to raise her baby was her job. She had to work long hours to make enough money to live, leaving her hardly any time to take care of her baby.

Ms Sakuna also struggles with the same problem. In the first months after giving birth, she hired a nanny for about 3,000 baht a month, but this proved too expensive.

So, she eventually sent Princess home to Mrs Kham, who was already busy with Pote.

Ms Tui continued working in Bangkok until Nong Pote was a year old. She then decided to leave her job and return home to be with her child.

It was not easy to find a job at home, however.

Ms Tui now sells food, but she has to travel over 80km every day to find enough customers.

Ms Sakuna cannot yet go home. "I have no idea when she will come back home to live," said Mrs Kham.

"She said she will come back and build a new house on our farm, but I just don't know when exactly.

"She has been gone for so long."

According to population specialists like Ms Bhassorn, the impact of migration on the family structure needs more attention from policy-makers. She stressed that the phenomenon of internal migration has prevailed for a long time and has an enormous impact on rural families.

"Relevant agencies should pay serious consideration to these issues in order to come up with proper policies to help improve the situation," Ms Bhassorn said.

Despite its prevalence, there is little information available on the issue to help support policy-makers, In the meantime, urban areas continue to expand and people are migrating in search of better opportunities.

Pointing to the heart of the matter, Ms Bhassorn says that despite the country's development over the years, the disparity in income between rich and poor remains little changed.