Quest for education creating ghost towns in Himalayas!

Ethnic Tibetan communities in Nepal's highlands are rapidly shrinking as more parents send their children away for a better education and modern careers, reveals a new study.

The trend is threatening to create a region of ghost towns in the Himalayas, the study warns.

"Migration of young people, a low birth rate and population ageing raises the chances of a massive population decline that has already exceeded 30 percent in the past decade in some communities," said study co-author Sienna Craig, associate professor at New Hampshire-based Dartmouth College.

The study predicts a further population decline of 50-60 percent in the next decade.

To reach this conclusion, researchers conducted household demographic and economic surveys in three villages in highland valleys of Nepal along the border of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of China.

The residents, descendents of ethnic Tibetans who migrated from the Tibetan Plateau at least 700 years ago, are subsistence farmers, herders and traders.

The researchers found that nearly 70 percent of females aged 15-19 live away from their native villages, a vast majority in boarding schools or convents.

Among women aged 20-29 (typically the highest fertility group) who are educational migrants, relatively few are married and have children, while many have become nuns.

"The out-migration trend runs contrary to previous concerns over population growth in Nepal as a whole, which has remained significant at a rate of 1.35 percent a year during the last decade," Craig noted.

The findings appeared in the journal Mountain Research and Development.