Robert Kaplan, an American writer, says that NGOs fill the void between thousands of villages and a remote, often broken, government.
Even worse, only 330, 000 people, including 5, 000 women, are competing for about 200, 000 municipal seats in Iran's 720 towns and cities plus its thousands of villages.
But just as India is realizing these challenges, it also already is responding, including appointing a climate change coordinator to each village council (and there are hundreds of thousands of villages in India).
CNN: Commentary: It's still the right time to combat global warming
During the conflict, which reached a peak in the mid-1990s, thousands of villages were destroyed in the largely Kurdish south-east and east of Turkey, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled to cities in other parts of the country.
Take, for instance, graphic footage of thousands of Kurdish villages gutted by the Turkish army, triggering a mass exodus of Kurdish villagers whom Mehmet encounters along the way.
And Afghanistan is a country not of very powerful cities but of thousands of isolated villages cut off in severe winters, allowing guerrillas and insurgents to melt away and return.
Nokia understood that thousands of Indians live in remote villages, where advertising is often difficult to penetrate.
It is not yet clear whether there were any casualties but thousands of Rabhas have fled the villages and taken shelter in makeshift camps set up by the administration.
Some fear a return to the excesses of the 1990s, when over 3, 000 Kurdish villages were forcibly evacuated and thousands of Kurds were imprisoned, murdered or disappeared.
Moreover, the ethnic cleansing of Georgians in South Ossetia is all too evident: Georgian villages have been destroyed and thousands of Georgians displaced by South Ossetian militia under Russia's watch.
Away from Fukushima, the tsunami caused widespread devastation, swamping entire villages, killing thousands of people and leaving many more homeless.
The new version will still flood a lot of forest: a reservoir of 516 square kilometres (200 square miles) will leave scores of villages awash and force thousands from their homes.
Thousands of buildings, roads and bridges in five villages have been damaged or destroyed.
In the preceding years, Saddam's forces had destroyed most Kurdish villages, killing tens of thousands and displacing many more.
If polio stays out of India, we can thank the thousands of health care workers who traveled to remote villages, in extremely difficult conditions, to dispense lifesaving vaccines.
Thousands of Arakanese reportedly descended by foot and boat on Muslim villages in nine townships, carrying machetes, swords, spears, homemade guns, Molotov cocktails, and other weapons.
The two separatist wars killed an estimated 100, 000 people, and Russian bombing reduced most of Chechnya's capital, Grozny, and many other towns and villages to rubble, sending tens of thousands fleeing.
Thousands of American Peace Corps volunteers have taught in your schools and villages.
That's where Arab militias known as Janjaweed have burned villages and terrorized civilians, leaving tens of thousands dead and driving some two million from their homes since 2003.
In Sudan hundreds of thousands are raped, murdered, and forced from their villages as the West's efforts to improve the situation are undermined by unconditional support for the regime in Khartoum from Beijing and Moscow.
Each night, thousands of children, some only four or five years old, leave their villages and walk for miles to the safety of Gulu, the biggest town in northern Uganda.
On August 11, strong earthquakes in northwest Iran destroyed and damaged hundreds of villages, causing the loss of many lives, leaving thousands without electricity, water, health care and other essential services.
During the floods in 2010, the World Heritage site was used as the only safe haven for thousands of flood affected families, staying here until the floods receded from their villages and towns.
Saddam Hussein's government went even further, using Iraqi oil revenues to finance the military campaigns that destroyed more than 4, 500 Kurdish villages and to pay for the poison gas used to kill thousands of Kurdish civilians.
In mid-September, the Kolka Glacier in the Caucasus Mountains collapsed, submerging villages in the Republic of North Ossetia (Russian Federation) under thousands of tons of ice and rock, killing over 120 people.
"Thousands have fled to other city districts and nearby villages and towns, " said Abu Mousab of Homs.
Here, an abundance of free-flowing freshwater springs support hundreds of thousands of olive and fruit trees and date palms, which also shade and cool the valley's mudbrick villages as they rest concealed in the greenery.
Like the student's family, at least two of the accused are from impoverished villages in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, and source for many of the thousands of migrants who come to Delhi every year hoping for a better life - the same journey her father made nearly 30 years ago.
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