Apropos of the editorial “Export, and its import” (THT, November 27, Page 6), the macroeconomic update has painted a lopsided export-import picture with the export touching just Rs 7.8 billion as against import totalling a massive Rs 136 billion during the review period.

This calls for either clampdown on imports, which is impossible, or ramping up exports on  war footing. We must encourage the entire trader community, including the smallest of the small, to focus on exports as much as they can of whatever commodity they can.

There is little point in waiting for tea, coffee, ginger, yarn, carpets, garments, footwear, iron and steel, handmade or machine made papers when the total export is limited to less than Rs 10 billion. We also need to attract foreign direct investment in agriculture so that we can produce in agriculture goods in mass scale and export them at competitive prices. The government must also free the exporters of all encumbrances such as Value Added Tax (VAT) or monthly reports to CRO and DOI which require the help of auditors at high fees for at least 10 years or till the export touches minimum Rs 100 billion, whichever comes first. As long as the payment comes through the formal banking channel without which export is not possible, the exporters should be freed from the need to submit monthly reports as well as VAT burden.

This might help in increasing the export. In any case, as export is so pathetic, there is no harm in trying out various ideas and steps to ramp up export efforts. One of the best ways to encourage export is to return VAT to the exporters immediately after they export the goods. It takes a lot of time to get VAT returned for the exported goods. This bureaucratic hassle must end to ramp up the export.

Manohar Shrestha, Kathmandu

Equal friends

It is important for parents to realise that as their kids grow up they need to treat them as equal friends. In our culture, parents often consider their children as their extended ego or mirror shadow and dump all their personal aspirations, frustrations and depression on them. The level of expectations being too high they start suffering from depression with advancing age as their kids grow up and start having their own space in life.

Parents feel neglected making their kid’s career, attention and prosperous future as their only goal in life. If parents keep pushing their kids beyond the final threshold level it only creates a huge communication gap or distance between them increasing over time. This pushes kids to move out of their close family circle and shift to their own personal orbit where parents have no roles to play anymore.

Every individual on this planet needs a personal space and a minimal privacy and parents need to remember and respect that.

A healthy and friendly relationship between parents and their kids always keeps a communication path open and enable both sides to reduce their differences through open and fair discussions.

Saikat Kumar Basu, Canada