Himalayan News Service

Kathmandu, February 11:

Dr Shankar Sharma, vice-chairman of the National Planning Commission (NPC) today said that national problems could be resolved with ‘effective management’ and a changed mindset, whether it is related to economy or development. Dr Sharma stressed that the planning system needs to focus on goals and outcome for which a changed mindset is needed. He was speaking at the 24th national assembly and annual general meeting of Management Association of Nepal (MAN).

Dr Sharma informed that the government is working and implementing projects according to priority and as per the 10th plan. He said that the time has come for all of us to be counted on account of work that is being done and not merely asking for increased budget allocations. He said that the government has a plan to bring intermediate price indicators and make them transparent for the public. He said that the budget should be linked to priority areas with effective enforcement of medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) with strengthened monitoring and immediate action plan enforcement. Not only that, increased participation of community people through effective decentralisation is crucial to better development outcome, he said.

Dr Arzu Deuba, president of MAN said that the association has been focusing its activities, during the past two years, to explore development possibilities on different subjects such as corporate governance, reform issues, governance and management issues by inviting concerned experts. Some programmes did turn out to be effective in terms of giving suggestions to the government and other policy experts, informed Dr Deuba. According the ‘Management Souvenir’ launched by MAN today, the national development performance by economic indicators in fiscal year 2003-04 has been recorded at 3.3 per cent growth rate which is slightly higher than the revised rate of 2.87 per cent in 2002-03.

While, agriculture GDP increased by 3.86 per cent, non-agriculture GDP increased by 3.5 per cent. However, the industrial growth remained merely at 1.8 per cent. The MAN report said that effectiveness of governance reforms in terms of their impact in development of governance capability was minimal. The reform efforts that were made at the bureaucratic level have proved to be useless with a weak state of political governance. The overall management of state was almost gloomy, says the report. At today’s function, Dr Sharma gave away the award of the Manager of the Year 2004 to Parmeshwore Mahaseth, chief executive officer of Salt Trading Corporation (STC).

The AGM of MAN today will also elect its new executive committee from various strata of experts such as economists, administration, business and industry.