The road to development typically involves dramatic migration from countryside to city. But in Nepal, there is a firm pull in the opposite direction and the pull comes from women determined to keep village life viable. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of "American Soul" (Mercury Press).

KATHMANDU -- Nepal's future is being written by a tug of war between men and women. On one end, men are migrating in droves from the countryside to this capital city. They hope to make a lot of money, buy a piece of land, and bring their families. On the other end, women are digging in their heels, refusing to leave the villages.

This tug-of-war is not about development. Ever since democracy made a comeback here in 1991, Nepalis have been talking development -- the English term crops up frequently in Nepali speech, as do phrases like "income generation." For all sectors of the population, the idea of Westernization, citification, has caught hold.

The real struggle is over how to interpret the word in a way that allows the village to survive. And the women of Nepal have the intuitive sense that unless development includes the village, enables the village to draw in the city rather than allowing the city to absorb the village, their children will have no real future in either the city or the countryside.

Nepal, officially classified as poor, is no economic tiger. It lacks the drive of supermodern Hong Kong or Bangkok. (Like the rest of East Asia, Nepalese describe countries like Thailand or South Korea not as tigers -- which they regard as shy creatures -- but as dragons or serpents. Nepalese worship serpents as divine creatures, but they would never consider becoming one.)

Still, this city's population has grown in the last 30 years from 200,000 to 2.2 million, and the number goes up every day. Never mind that water is so short people have to fetch it from distant taps -- what counts for the newcomers is a stake in the city's land.

For the urban migrants and their children, love of village life remains -- in their clustered settlements, they draw the village in around them. But villages are where you go when you're old and there's nothing left to earn and learn. They are places where drinking water is still hard to get, where children get sick, even die, from diarrhea, where people have little money and have to carry huge burdens every day up to high mountain areas, where "at night the toilet is anywhere and everywhere."

Who would want to live in places like these? It happens that a lot of people in Nepal do, especially women, and with their determination to save their villages and keep their families intact they are emerging as a strong new counterforce.

And it is the women who want real development -- meaning safe, clean drinking water. They want toilets -- the English word is used -- in their homes. They want all-weather roads connecting their villages with towns and cities so they can do "income generating" (again, an English word). And they want a health post with medicines and a medical person to heal their children.

Women may know that if they, too, abandon the villages, the villages will surely die. For one thing, retired people cannot carry big loads up to high mountain settlements, villages, and only so much can be piled onto the backs of the fewer and fewer young people who remain.

Young women may also want to stay away from the cities because they know that city men may work hard outside the house -- but inside it is the women who must do the household work.

And perhaps the women also sense that the city life cannot last without land that produces food and medicine and crops. So all over the countryside, women's groups meet and discuss problems and, above all, collect money from each other without the suspicion of corruption that often afflicts men of power handling money.

For these women the village has become a public space where they can talk as the men listen. To make sure the men do not laugh them off they keep records in great and precise detail. The men who find it hard to manage cash and too often drink too much are impressed.

Maybe these women are gaining the strength of goddesses -- like Kali, who is widely worshipped here and in India. The result a generation down could be regenerated villages producing crops rather than real estate.