Rural life in Turkey (1960-1970)

The general population of Turkey in 1960 was 27 754 820 people. 18 895 089 of them live in rural areas, namely in districts, villages and hamlets. The population living in rural areas constitutes 68.07% of Turkey. In this period, Anatolia was still a peasant geography. Turkey, which is trying to integrate into the Capital and Liberal systems that developed in the world after the Second World War, has to consciously shift some of this large mass, which could not be active in the countryside, to the cities, that is, to the commercial and industrial areas. The expectation from here is to be able to develop like big economies. Therefore, when he first realized that he could not meet the necessary needs of the population, he tried to bring the population under control. In this context, by enacting a law on population planning on April 1, 1965, it allowed individuals to control birth with medical methods. In the understanding of creating an educated mass, which is the condition of modernization and development, the success is half. There is no school in 45% of 35,339 villages. In the field of health, socialization policies and community development within the scope of the First Five-Year Development Plans. It is aimed to benefit from the basic health services of the society with the plans. In this period, there is 1 doctor for every 40,000 people in Turkey. Approximately 10,000 million people in the Anatolian countryside are far from water resources. In agriculture, the main source of livelihood is agriculture, hunting, forestry, fishing, etc. The ratios to the general population are 74.9%. Rural Crops such as wheat, barley, rye, oats, corn and rice are cultivated. However, only an area of 35,584,000 hectares is used as fields, vineyards, orchards and olive groves. The rest cannot be cultivated. This necessitated the search for a solution for the distribution of land to the peasants who had no land. During this period, Turkey implemented two development plans. Efforts were made to transform the agricultural products produced by the village and the countryside into industrial branches. However, the desired level of development could not be experienced due to the insufficient budget allocated by the state for development. In this study, a historical analysis of the rural policies of the administrators in Turkey between 1960-1970 was made on the basis of discourse-action comparison. To what extent did the socio-economic life of rural villagers and farmers receive attention in this period? What improvements have been made to living standards? What has been done for the modernization of the countryside? It is examined what kind of direction the efforts of the Assembly and Senate, the legislators of the period, to determine and solve the problems related to rural areas follow. In the sections of our research, which were examined under the titles of Population, Education, Health, Agriculture, Transportation/Security/Other Vital Problems, we examined the problems that were experienced in the Anatolian countryside in the 1960s and were waiting to be solved.