Thursday, August 28, 2008

Tambon creations in the 1990s

I had worked through some of the Royal Gazette announcements for the creations of subdistricts before, mentioned for example when I noted the renumbering of the villages when a new subdistrict was carved out. But so far it was only those in Surat Thani, or in case I needed information on a specific subdistrict for filling a Wikipedia with referenced information.

But I have already started to work through the announcements a bit more systematically, at first doing only those creations in the 1990s. There is a total of 318 announcements within the 1990s titled "ประกาศกระทรวงมหาดไทย เรื่อง ตั้งและเปลี่ยนแปลงเขตตำบล" (Announcement of the Ministry of Interior on the creation and change of area of subdistricts). However this only means there were at least 318 subdistricts created, as sometimes more than one creation is covered in one announcement - once I am through I will post a more detailed statistics. Most of the time a new subdistrict is carved out of a single subdistrict, but occasionally villages from several subdistricts are put together to form a new one. Also the number of villages differs - Ban Khuan Mut (ตำบลบ้านควนมุด) in Chulabhorn district, Nakhon Si Thammarat has just 2 villages right from its creation, but there also several which have 9 or 10 villages.

The last subdistrict were created effective November 16 1996, for reasons I don't know yet - either the Asian financial crisis, or the change of focus on the local government units. Maybe the book Thailand: a late decentralizing country will give me more on this.

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