Building New Rural Areas in Coastal Areas: Issues

(Baonghean) - In the construction of new rural areas, the Central Steering Committee has issued a set of national standards with 19 common criteria for the whole country. However, for Nghe An, due to its low starting point and large area, each region has its own difficulties when building new rural areas. In particular, coastal communes with limited land and large populations need to be consulted and planned.

Difficult… from the planning milestone

For generations, coastal people have lived together with the characteristic of "narrow land, crowded people". The reason is that due to frequent natural disasters such as storms and floods, coastal people tend to live in very concentrated areas, even accepting to live in narrow spaces. In many places, over time, the sea water has encroached further, making the villages even narrower. In Quynh Long commune, one of the typical coastal communes of Quynh Luu, the whole commune has 9,800 people/8 hamlets but only 32.9 hectares of residential land; with a density of about 5 square meters/person, houses are close together, the inner-village roads are only 1 - 2 meters wide, the inter-hamlet roads are only over 3 - 3.5 meters wide. Similarly, Quynh Lap commune of Hoang Mai town has a population of 10,200 people/13 hamlets but only 38.9 hectares of residential land, houses are arranged along the mountain slopes, so not only is it narrow but also difficult to move around due to steep roads, some hamlets have to build stairs to move around. The entire Quynh Lap commune has 12.2 km of roads, but only about half a kilometer of inter-hamlet roads can be traveled by single-lane cars, the rest can only be traveled by motorbike or on foot. For this reason, many families building new houses have to “increase the cost” of transporting materials for hundreds of meters, even kilometers, which is quite costly. This is a common situation in coastal communes with high population density such as Tien Thuy, Son Hai (Quynh Luu), Quynh Phuong (Hoang Mai)...

New rural road in Dong Tam village, Quynh Lap (Quynh Luu).

Therefore, when entering the construction of the new rural area, unlike mountainous areas or purely agricultural areas, coastal communes have difficulty from the first step of setting up planning markers. The paradox is that if we set up completely new planning markers, it is no different from a suspended planning because it cannot be implemented, and if we set up markers accepting the current status, it does not meet the criteria for building the new rural area. For Quynh Lap commune, the difficulty is that because of the unfinished Dong Hoi Industrial Park, 6/13 hamlets have to wait for the planning of the superiors before they can make their own planning.

For this reason, many coastal communes have not been able to announce the marking of the new rural planning. The reason is that the policy of building new rural areas with relatively high and "open" infrastructure criteria has only been introduced in the last few years, while residential areas with road systems and houses were designed spontaneously, not according to the planning of decades, even hundreds of years ago, so it is not easy to edit... Not only in the past but now, the housing needs of people are increasing and the land fund is running out, so people can only take advantage of the existing area to upgrade their houses. And because there is no detailed planning, there is a situation where everyone does whatever they want, not respecting the general planning, making management according to the new rural planning even more difficult. If the announcement and marking are not made in time, people will repair their houses and build more solidly, making it even more difficult to mobilize people and redesign the infrastructure.

Not only is it difficult due to narrow roads, cultural institutions such as community learning centers, commune headquarters, and village cultural houses also find it difficult to meet the prescribed criteria. According to regulations, each hamlet must have an area of ​​500 m2, but most of the hamlet cultural houses in coastal communes such as Quynh Luu, Hoang Mai or Dien Chau have an area of ​​200 to 300 m2, even some hamlets only have 100 m2 and have no possibility of expanding further.

One disadvantage is that most coastal communes were not selected as pilot communes for the New Rural Development Program, so although the program has been launched for more than 3 years, the communes have not received any support from the budget. Due to lack of funds, right from the stage of printing documents and making public plans to collect opinions from local people, the work has been very difficult and reluctant. When talking about mobilizing people to donate land for road construction, a commune leader said: Just hoping that when people build houses, they will comply with the boundaries and not encroach on public land is already helping the locality, because there is little land so it is impossible to mobilize people to donate.

Go forward

In fact, seeing the difficulties, most coastal communes have registered to build new rural areas in the next phase from 2016 - 2020. However, if we look a little further ahead, we can see that coastal communes, due to their narrow area and relatively good living conditions, are the ones leading the way in hardening rural roads. Since the 1990s, Quynh Lap, Quynh Long and Tien Thuy communes have had asphalt and concrete roads; along with the national grid, the rate of people watching TV...

Currently, according to the new criteria, despite difficulties, coastal communes have been making great efforts to gradually improve their infrastructure to meet the NTM criteria. Through research and review, although they registered late, most communes have achieved 7-10 criteria up to this point, including criteria that are difficult for other regions but are stronger for coastal communes such as average income per capita, economic development business models. In addition to the capacity for catching aquatic products and fishing logistics, coastal communes also have a large source of income from labor export. Therefore, coastal communes are communes with a fairly high average income per capita, in 2013 Quynh Long was 31 million VND, Quynh Lap reached 22 million VND/person/year. There are "soft" criteria but based on their own conditions, communes are focusing on investing in completing such as rural markets, environmental sanitation, etc.

Mr. Tran Quang Ve, Chairman of the People's Committee of Quynh Long Commune, said: Due to the large population and the main economic activities being exploitation and fishing at sea, one of the local priorities is to have a market. The market not only serves the trading needs of the people but is also a place for the locality to consume products, provide fishing logistics and provide the commune with additional revenue for investment and development.

In addition to rural markets, environmental sanitation in coastal communes is also a strict criterion. A few years ago, coastal communes were often the place where digestive diseases, malaria epidemics, etc. broke out because environmental sanitation work was not done well; there was a time when beach sanitation became a source of frustration and shame for the locality. However, along with the process of investing in renovating houses, coastal residents are now aware and one of the priorities when building houses for coastal residents is investing in septic tanks. Thanks to that, in just a short time, nearly 70% of households have built septic tanks; communes have established garbage collection teams with the Women's Union as the core to each hamlet and the commune has signed a contract with the environmental company to collect garbage twice a week and bring it to the district's landfill, solving this urgent problem.

Along with the improvement of living standards, coastal communes have paid more attention and invested more in education and health care, so these criteria have also changed in quality. The leaders of Quynh Long commune determined that in building a new rural area, the commune or hamlet headquarters may not have enough area, but they must try to ensure that schools and clinics have enough area and meet standards. Meanwhile, Mr. Vuong Dai Tuong, Vice Chairman of Quynh Lap Commune People's Committee, said that despite difficulties in resources, the commune is focusing resources to complete the commune health station to meet national standards in the coming time. In addition, it is necessary to continue to encourage and mobilize people to expand and adjust roads, upgrade schools, encourage the development of economic models, etc.

Through discussions with leaders of some communes, in the face of many difficulties, the only direction and solution for coastal communes is to strive; easy criteria should be done first, difficult criteria should be done later so that the criteria achieved must be truly sustainable. In addition, local representatives also said that the new set of criteria for building new rural areas has just been revised, so it is not necessary to adjust them anymore, but should be evaluated in the direction that some soft criteria for mountainous areas should also have soft criteria for coastal communes; it is necessary to encourage communes to achieve high levels such as average income criteria or business development models to improve people's lives, maintaining landscapes and environmental sanitation will get extra points; there are plans to support people in design and planning to increase land use coefficients and socialize community cultural activity spots, villages, etc.

Article and photos:Nguyen Hai