Municipal decisions for August 3 2009

Meeting number 34 of board 1 from August 3 2009 with 2 TAO upgraded to subdistrict municipalities.

• Bua Khao, Kuchinarai district, Kalasin province, effective on July 31 2009, upgraded and renamed to Kuchinarai (เทศบาลตำบลกุฉินารายณ์), to avoid confusion with the municipality Bua Khao (เทศบาลตำบลบัวขาว). The TAO was created in 1996, covers 67 km², 16 villages and 7,979 citizen.
• Kut Khao (เทศบาลตำบลกุดค้าว), Kuchinarai district, Kalasin province, effective July 31 2009. The TAO was created in 1996, covers 18.50 km², 8 villages and 4,155 citizen.

2nd birthday of blog

This blog now exists for two years, and again my worrying that I would run out of topics was strongly rebutted. In fact, I currently have so many topics that I have pre-written postings for two months, only leaving spaces for the current news like fresh announcements in the Royal Gazette. And of course a big number of postings thanks to the many new municipalities, in contrast to what I expected for this year, helped to enable me to write a posting every day, I even had to post some on the weekend to reduce the queue.

Whereas the Google hits have more-or-less stagnated at 650 a month in the last year, the number of readers using the RSS feed (or subscribing by email) reached a maximum of 100 subscribers according to feedburner which is way beyond what I expected before for such a technical and obscure topic. Though I guess most of my readers aren't as deep into the topic as myself, I can only repeat my invitation from the last birthday posting of using the comment function to interact, even if only to thank me for presenting something not found in the non-Thai web beforehand.

But it's of course not that I get no feedback at all, and I even got into contact with a few interesting people by this blog already, like an academic working with the Thai census data who could use the tabular data collected in the spreadsheet very well. In return, her questions let me look once again through the geocodes used in the past censuses and notice new facts I previously overlooked.

Geocities and TAO

On October 26 Yahoo will shut down their free webhosting service Geocities, which back at the beginning of the WWW was one of most popular sites. Though most of the sites hosted there won't be missed, and have been moved to other pages like facebook. So why should I care? Several of the Tambon administrative organizations (TAO), not having the funds for a real web presence with a well-designed webpage, have instead created pages on Geocities, which though often badly designed or partially broken still were a source of information about these entities. I hope I have found all the relevant already and extracted at least the Muban lists from them.

As an example I chose the TAO Wang Sai in Khlong Khlung district, Kamphaeng Phet province. Their Geocities websize ubtwangsai only contains the photos and names of all the officials and employees in the TAO, and while it has some more links these have no target page yet. Also, the counter in bottom shows a mere 540 visits since it was started in October 2006. However, unlike other TAO, Wang Sai actually moved to a separate webpage already and only forgot to close down their geocities page - but their new one at wangsai.org is still a broken one, for example most of the links in the menu point to a local file and probably indicate that these pages in fact haven't been written yet.

And since Geocities isn't profitable enough to be continued, I have my doubts other similar services would continue long as well. One which is also fairly popular with Thai entities is tripod.

Petition on municipality upgrade

Petitions and the replies by the authority are an interesting special kind of announcements published in the Royal Gazette. Interestingly there are only exactly two of this kind on municipalities, and even more interesting both are on the same municipality - Ban Phai (เทศบาลตำบลบ้านไผ่), Ban Phai district, Khon Kaen province.

The first petition was filed by the member of parliament Premsak Phiayura (เปรมศักดิ์ เพียยุระ) on December 15 1997, and answered and published on March 4 1998. Also the second petition, filed on August 30 2001 and answered and published on July 30 2002 was filed by Premsak, who is a local of Ban Phai.

The main reason why both petitions were unsuccessful, and the municipality still hasn't been upgraded today is quite easy to see. In the latest population statistics from DOPA the municipality has 30,079 citizen, however one of the preconditions for the upgrade to either city or town status is 50,000 citizen.

Though especially the starting page of the website of the municipality is very overloaded, it also has a lot of informative contents. One thing I haven't seen in that quality before is the seal of the municipality (ตราประจำเทศบาล) - unlike most websites it is displayed here in a very high resolution version which would be print-worthy by itself already. With such a good template I could easily create a vector version which fixes the few layer alignment problems in the raster file. The full description of the emblem is also not that often found.

Following the description found there, the emblem shows the following elements

• The chedi Phra That Kham Kaen (องค์พระธาตุขามแก่น), the symbol of the province Khon Kaen.
• Three bamboo stems, the symbol of the district Ban Phai (Phai, (ไม้)ไผ่ means Bamboo). The number three symbolizes the three cornerstones of democracy - respect, harmony, wisdom.
• The 15 leaves of the bamboo represent the 15 municipal officials sent by the Department of Local Administration to build the local administration.
• and in the circle around the emblem it has the word "เทศบาลตำบลบ้านไผ่" (Ban Phai subdistrict municipality) at the top, and "จังหวัดขอนแก่น" (Khon Kaen province) at the bottom.

Two recent blog postings on TAO elections

Though the recent elections for the TAO did not get much news coverage, at least not in the English press, last week two blogs had interesting postings about the current state of local politics in Thailand.

In the article Local politics that ‘you can eat’ (Thai เลือกตั้ง อบต. การเมืองที่กินได้) by the web newspaper Prachatai the vote buying in a northern Thai village is described.

As Election Day drew near, the village teemed with campaign staff for candidates running for the position of TAO Chairperson, who came to visit the villagers, distributing 1.5-litre bottles of soft drinks and ice, which really pleased the young kids.
The handouts went on blatantly, but did not reach where Achara was staying. Canvassers who were local villagers themselves were well aware that it was illegal, but also that knew they would be found guilty only if someone made a complaint. The canvassers would never complain against one another as each would mind their own business. And the villagers were too happy to care who gave what.
[...]
Many villagers told Achara that vote buying was the normal practice in the village. Candidates would choose to pay those who were not their relatives to collect additional votes to win the seats; with 100 baht per vote, 10,000-20,000 baht would be enough.

Still the same muddy way of politics, not different from the cases of the 1990s described in the book Democracy, Development and Decentralization in Provincial Thailand I read earlier this year.

But not all voters see the decentralization only from the viewpoint of having more election and thus more chances to get paid for their votes. Bangkok Post assistant editor Sanitsuda Ekachai in her blog wrote that There's still hope for Thai democracy.

A decade ago, Kuanru was a miniature of today's national politics. It was ridden with vote-buying, nepotism, corruption and factional feuds along party lines. The once close-knit community became divisive through mud-slinging campaigns which left deep resentment on all sides after the elections. Relatives no longer spoke to one another. When one group initiated any programme, the rival camp vetoed it. Old problems festered while new ones emerged and kept piling up.

But then a new generation of politicians, labeled "Young Turks" after the reformist party at the end of the Ottoman Empire, was fed up with it, set up a community development plan in a public meeting of all interested citizen, allowed election losers to work with the winning team, and most of all did all with transparency and not behind closed doors. So those only doing politics for their personal gain, the ones who need to do vote buying to secure their gains, had no chance anymore. While there are several such localities where the politics matured into what democracy is supposed to be, sadly these areas are still by far the minority. At least there is hope...

Thaification of district and subdistrict names

The two premierships of Field Marshall Phibun Songkhram 1938 to 1944 and again 1948 to 1957 were marked with a strong nationalistic politics, like forcing to use the central Thai language instead of the regional dialects (or even the Yawi used in the deep south provinces), the banning of several occupations for the Chinese immigrants and so on. I first became aware of this policy with respect to the administrative subdivision via the Wikipedia article on Non Thai district in Nakhon Ratchasima province, which was renamed from Non Lao to Non Thai in 1941.

While this was the only district which got its non-Thai roots removed from the name, there were quite a lot of subdistrict which were equally renamed in the 1939 announcement.

• Lao (ลาว): Non Lao to Non Thai (Nakhon Ratchasima), Phueng Lao to Phueng Ruang, Ban Lao to Thap Kwang, Salari Lao to Mueang Kao, Muang Lao to Muang Ngam (Saraburi). In Saraburi it had a lot of Vientiane Lao forcibly resettled there in 1779.
• Chin(ese) (จีน): Ban Chin to Chalong (Satun), Nong Chin to Khok Sai (Phatthalung), Wat Sam Chin to Sam Yaek (Phra Nakhon, i.e. Bangkok), Bang Nang Chin to Thai Hat (Samut Songkhram)
• Mon (มอญ): Ban Mon to Sam Suan (Chaiyaphum), Ban Mon to Ban Kao (Chonburi), Ku Mon to Hua Sai (Chachoengsao), Tha Mon to Khun Kaeo (Nakhon Pathom) Na Mon Nuea to Ban Na and Na Mon Tai to Khlong Cham Long (Sukhothai), Bang Mon to Ton Pho (Singburi)
• Khmer (เขมร): Wang Khmer to Tha Dong Rang (Kanchanaburi)

And the above linked announcement isn't the only one, there was another in 1940 containing more subdistricts with Chin and Mon in their names removed.

Municipal decisions for July 28 2009

Meeting number 32 of board 1 from July 28 2009 with 15 TAO upgraded to subdistrict municipalities.