Apropos of the “Biz Briefs: Rwanda tourism” (THT, July 27, Page 11), big wisdom comes in tiny news packages. Nepali travel traders who are despondent over their continuous failure in garnering a million tourists despite shifting timeline goalpost several times should take heart from the wisdom in the news brief. What you cannot get in number could be achieved through revenue. Unless we want to be like Magaluf milling with British tourists that displace the locals, we could follow in the footsteps of Botswana, Bhutan and now Rwanda. We need to decide what is good for us: bringing 10,000 tourists a day at 30 dollars or bringing 1000 tourists at 300 dollars. If we get 30 million tourists and 30 billion dollars as in Thailand that would be good too. But Nepal’s tourism seems a little peculiar. Neither it is like Thailand nor like Bhutan. Even our magnanimity in offering free visa to Chinese tourists has failed to equal or displace Indian tourist arrivals. It shows that free offer baits are the last thing that tourists would bite into. Perhaps we need a complete makeover of our image and brand. The first step is to draw the best of people resources into the business, people who can tell the difference between a fine lobster and a local farmhouse fish. Unlike other sectors like banking where a teller can stare a customer down, doing so in tourism will cause the tourists to retreat into thin air.

Manohar Shrestha, Kathmandu

Premature

The recent move to hike tax rates by Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) seemed rather premature, done without much forethought, and done just to exert its newly received domain in collecting revenue inside its jurisdiction. Tax should go hand in hand with the expenditure of the government body and the services received by the people, and even then the government body should be concerned about its citizens first. Only increasing the taxes increases the financial burden onto the people. There was another news item in THT on April 24 about KMC collecting double the targeted revenue from advertisements. While that was welcome news, yet KMC should base its fees and taxes not on some random number that might sound good to its board members but on a careful study and research that would balance the tax burden on people and the needed expenditure to support its services, infrastructure, and maintenance. In other words, tax should not be something to boast about on part of any government, but rather transparency and good governance should. One question that would come up with KMC imposing the new taxes is about how many times citizens living in the city are burdened with paying the taxes for the same property or service and within the same time period. If the regional bodies compete with the federal government in collecting revenue then the burden will be on the backs of the people. Businesses will be afflicted with the layers of taxes and bureaucracies to deal with, and consequently more regulations as well.

Rajendra Man Singh, via e-mail