Rural Business Hub: Framework for a New Rural Development Approach in Rain-Fed Areas of Pakistan—A Case of Punjab Province

The purpose of this article is to present a framework that could be used to achieve the objective of sustainable rural development in a community which is characterized by high numbers of smallholders, landless peasants, and unskilled or semi-skilled labor ultimately leading to low productivity and high rates of poverty. The study presents a design inspired by “Saemaul Undong†(New Village Movement) of South Korea. The proposed model is based on proposing a four-tier approach for the working of the village-level cooperatives which will be self-reliant through a network connection to the national and international markets. Existing studies and surveys in Punjab province of Pakistan have established that rural areas are often lacking essential facilities that affect the abilities of these areas to retain skilled manpower thus leading to resource drain and negatively impacting the agricultural productivity. The proposed Village-City Model, “VCM,†was designed to strengthen the local infrastructure and built interest-based cooperatives to develop an environment which can sustain the benefits of higher productivity and translate these into better livelihoods. It is proposed that farmer-centered cooperatives with appropriate institutional arrangements could result in developing village-based cities where skilled manpower can exert to in better resource use efficiency, access to market coupled with rural finance schemes to enhance resource base and access to technology. The cooperatives experience is considered as a bitter experience in Pakistan. However, the analysis of failures of cooperatives in Pakistan revealed many bottlenecks which have been addressed through indigenization of Saemaul Undong.