Tambon maps inaccuracy

Rarely plagiarizing blogs have some good effects, but in this case it helped me to reread an article where I missed an interesting point at first reading months ago. The Huai Hee village blog copied an article without giving any sources, and as I vaguely remembered the maps included and also doubted that this would have been an original posting I searched with Google for the original source. Thus in fact that text was taken out of a the paper Maps for participatory planning in Thailand by Oliver Puginier. Higher resolution versions of the maps can be found at the older paper Can participatory land use planning at community level in the highlands of northern Thailand use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a communication tool?. Or, in the longest form in his dissertation, which also deals with the problems with the decentralization since 1995.

Anyway, the interesting part is the following:

It is interesting to note that Pa Kaa village lies outside the Tambon boundary (in neighbouring Pai district in fact), if the data provided by NNCO are correct. To date there exist no reliable maps from the Royal Survey Department indicating Tambon boundaries and work is in progress to produce this data, yet the provincial office gives the total area of Huai Poo Ling as 37,152 ha. As far as land use planning is concerned it is important to note that there are overlapping areas claimed by adjacent villages (marked in pink), which may lead to conflicting claims over its use.

So while the contradicting maps I had run into were a different case, in the lower scales the boundaries are sometimes not yet completely defined. Maybe the announcements in the Royal Gazette I spotted last year and dubbed "Tambon area clarifications" are the result of such mapping work mentioned as being in progress in the paper.

Village headman life in the deep south

Yesterday I discovered the website deepsouthwatch featuring independent news on the three southernmost Muslim provinces troubled by the insurgency since 2004. Most welcome is of course the English section of the site. I only checked the captions yesterday however, so it was via Bangkok Pundit that I became aware of an interview with a village headman (Phu Yai Ban) showing the depressing situation these official are working in.

Dee, the leader of Ban Salo (บ้านสโลว์) village, Village 7 of Rueso subdistrict, Rueso district, Narathiwat province, became village headman in 2007 after insurgents killed his father, who was the headman before. Aged just 28 he is probably one of the youngest headmen in the whole country, but has to work under a continuous threat of loosing his life.

It is well-known that being a village head man is one of the riskiest positions. You do not have to have any statistics to prove this statement. For Leader Dee’s case, he was attacked 4 times and survived. If he were a Buddhist, he would have called it a miracle or, he might pray a thousand times to his Buddha amulet hanging around his neck. But as a Muslim, he believes that this is a test from “Allah”.

Not surprisingly he is shown in the photos wearing a bullted proof vest, and His place was surrounded by sandbags and the curtain trees; it was similar to the military camps in the three southernmost provinces. But despite the martial look, he is doing his best to return peace into his small realm.

“It’s a mess. We don’t know what’s going on. The people who are in the middle become victims of the group that intended to use violence for their own benefits.” He concluded.

Because of these reasons, after Leader Dee announced officially to fight as the village headman, he also announced that he will decrease the number of violence in this village and will protect the life of every soldier that camped in this area.

I can only recommend to read the interview completely, it gives the conflict a face which in the news reports is only numbers of dead people.

DOPA and DOLA

Since I am often referring to the website of the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA), I should maybe write about this government structure a bit.

DOPA (กรมการปกครอง) is one of the departments of the Ministry of Interior (MOI, กระทรวงมหาดไทย), and it has its offices located within the compound of the ministry.

Another related department of the Ministry of Interior is the Department of Local Administration (DOLA, กรมส่งเสริมการปกครองท้องถิ่น). In fact this department was split off from DOPA in 1997, when the decentralization to the local administration with municipalities and Tambon administrative organization came into the focus. This office is located near Vimanmek palace. The emblem above is the one of DOLA, but the one of DOPA and the ministry use the same lion as their emblem, but I could not find an equally clean picture on the web.

In the great graphical visualization of the 2009 budget created by Markpeak one can directly see the relative importance between DOPA and DOLA. In fact DOLA has a much larger budget than DOPA, 70% of the budget of MOI goes to DOLA, but only 12.6% to DOPA. Or in numbers (in million Baht)

Department of Local Administration (DOLA)	136,152.3
Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA)	24,705.1
Ministry of Interior (MOI)	195,574.1

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Etymology of district name Hot

The origins of place names sometimes quite interesting. I have stumbled upon the one for the district Hot in Chiang Mai reading a book I did not expect to find anything on the administrative entities - Sacred Mountains Of Northern Thailand And Their Legends by Donald K. Swearer. As the title says, the book is on religious folktales, especially on the travels of Lord Buddha in northern Thailand on which he left those footprints and other relics now worshiped by the local people.

After the Buddha spent seven days at Doi Kung he came down from the mountain and journeyed north through a forest for a distance of approximately 20,000 meters to the Mae Ping river. There he met a Lawa farmer who was using a wheel to irrigate a field. When he saw the Buddha approach, the farmer unwound the turban from his head in order to wash the Buddha's feet. After he removed the turban from his head, it miraculously turned into gold. Amazed, the farmer said to the Buddha, "O, Blessed One, by your kindness please reside here in the north with us."
[...]
After the Buddha had given the Lawa the precepts, he spoke to the monks: "Before the Tathagatha came here the Lawa had to use a water wheel to irrigate their fields because this a very dry area (Thai, heang hot). Consequently, this place shall be known as Hot.

However, it seems the word Hot (ฮอด) meaning "dry, arid" is not normal Thai, as even the most complete online dictionary Longdo does not have an entry on it.

Administrations who blog

Googeling the websites of the local government units - municipalities and subdistrict administrative organizations - I have come across some who are present on the blogging sites Blogspot or Wordpress. Announcing news from the administration is something where a RSS feed comes most handy, so one does not have to visit the website every now and then only to notice that something interesting was announced on short notice and is over already. While any decent content management system would allow RSS feeds to include into the website itself, as well as presenting such news on the site, only very few have such sophisticated websites using all the possibilities. The blogging websites offer a free alternative, and much easier to setup and use than a complex content management system.

In no particular order, there are four such blogs I discovered so far, with a varying depth of content. But of course all only in Thai language.

• Nong Chik district, Pattani: nongjik.blogspot.com
• Luang Nuae subdistrict municipality, Chiang Mai: tambonloungnuae.wordpress.com/
• Yaha subdistrict municipality, Yala: tesbanyaha.blogspot.com
• Mueang Kao subdistrict municipality, Khon Kaen: mk-mainblog.blogspot.com

While the above seem to be by the administrations itself, also some of the officers have personal work-related blogs. So far I only found one of this kind, written by the Financial and accounting officer of TAO Siao, Pho Si Suwan, Sisaket. Her blog is named แนะนำอบต.เสียว (Counsel TAO Siao). It's a pity I can only read these blogs with online translators like Google Translate, they could provide some interesting insights on the daily work in the local government.

There is another group of government units using blogs, however these seem to have misunderstood blogging with free webhosting. Instead of more-or-less regularily post news or stories, they have only once posted several articles with the informations on the entity, like the history, location, subdivisions. Two examples are

• TAO Wat Pa, Lom Sak district, Phetchabun: watpa-sao.blogspot.com
• TAO Ko Kaeo, Selaphum district, Roi Et: kohkaew101.blogspot.com

And some other even made it that far, they have empty blogs where only the header or the sidebar indicate that they were intended to be about the administration.

• TAO Mae Mok, Thoen district, Lampang: maemok.blogspot.com
• TAO Na Khaem, Mueang Loei district, Loei: tambolnakham.blogspot.com
• TAO Ban Mai Nong Sai, Aranyaprathet district, Sa Kaeo: banmainongsai.wordpress.com

Satellite Muban

While extracting the Muban lists from TAO websites, I have come across something noteworthy again. The TAO Pang Mapha in Mae Hong Son on the data page give their subdivision as follows

องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลปางมะผ้า มีพื้นที่รับผิดชอบ จำนวน 11 หมู่บ้านและ 3 หมู่บ้านบริวาร ได้แก่
หมู่ที่ 1 บ้านแม่ละนา
หมู่ที่ 2 บ้านปางคาม หมู่บ้านบริวารบ้านน้ำจาง
หมู่ที่ 3 บ้านไม้ฮุง หมู่บ้านบริวารบ้านปางคามน้อย
หมู่ที่ 4 บ้านจ่าโบ่
หมู่ที่ 5 บ้านยาป่าแหน หมู่บ้านบริวารบ้านผาเจริญ
หมู่ที่ 6 บ้านผาแดง
หมู่ที่ 7 บ้านไม้ลัน
หมู่ที่ 8 บ้านห้วยเฮี๊ยะ
หมู่ที่ 9 บ้านลุกข้าวหลาม
หมู่ที่ 10 บ้านผาเผือก
หมู่ที่ 11 บ้านบ่อไคร้

The new thing I did not notice before elsewhere are the three Muban Boriwan (หมู่บ้านบริวาร). Boriwan (บริวาร) is the Thai word for satellite, so though I could not find any official description of the meaning of Muban Boriwan, I can guess these are the secondary settlements covered into one administrative village. When I wrote on the different types of villages I already explained that an administrative village, the central administrative unit with one elected village headman and his deputies, can consist of several settlements if they are too small to form an administrative village by themselves.

A Google search returned several websites using this term, including several TAO websites especially from the less populated areas, so I am quite certain that satellite villages are nothing but the secondary villages in an administrative village.

More special administrative areas?

Just on Friday I mentioned an old clipping on a planned special administrative area for Laem Chabang, I found the one below at thephuketinsider posted on last Friday as well.

News out of the nation's capitol has the island of Koh Samui and Mae Sot in Tak Province as lead contenders for upgrades to Special Administration Zones. Currently in Thailand only Bangkok and Pattaya fall under this sector. One of the key benefits of falling into this category is the ability to elect senior local Government officials rather then appointments that are routinely rotated throughout the various provinces of the country.

While there seems to be some confusion caused by the fact that the two cities Pattaya and Bangkok are both called "special administrative areas", the administrative structure is totally different - Pattaya is merely a special kind of municipality, while Bangkok is both a province and a municipality. Since I already knew that a special administrative area modeled after Pattaya was discussed for Mae Sot before, this is probably not about new province-like entities similar to Bangkok.

I found one additional article in Thai already dating from September mentioning both Mae Sot and Ko Samui, naming the new administration "เมืองพิเศษ" (Mueang Phiset, special town) - yet in another government press statement from October Mae Sot is named "เขตเศรษฐกิจพิเศษ", meaning just "special economic zone", which not necessarily includes administrative changes.

What surprises me is the fact that Ko Samui is proposed to be changed as well. Just one and a half year ago Ko Samui was upgraded from subdistrict municipality to town municipality, and even at first planned to become a city municipality. But anyway, it will be interesting to see what will happen with these two, whether the government will make separate style of special administrative areas for these two, or will extend and generalize the Mueang Pattaya act to these two areas instead.