Consumer rights

This is in reference to the article “Consumer rights” by Ram Chandra Subedi published in THT on April 12.

I agree with the writer that though many acts relating to protection of consumer rights have been enacted in Nepal, they have not been properly implemented, and the dishonest businessmen and vested interest groups continue to deceive not only the consumers but also the government.

Recently I went to Suraj Arcade to purchase some goods. As a conscious consumer, I asked for the VAT bill but the shopkeeper refused. The government reiterates that VAT amount is included in commodities but umpteen businessmen say the opposite. Everywhere, from a small retail shop to a departmental store, consumer exploitation is rampant, as price of the same commodity differs from place to place.

Though the rule for displaying price list in every shop exists, how many shopkeepers follow it? All rules and acts are limited in papers only. They are enacted for the benefit of the consumers, but due to lack of monitoring and supervision by the government all profit is taken by adroit businessmen. The present government should therefore address the consumer rights issue.

Birendra Shrestha, Kirtipur

Be polite

I just returned to Washington D.C. from a delightful two weeks stay in Kathmandu, a unique place for foreign tourists. However, I would like to make a suggestion regarding motorcycle riders in Kathmandu.

It seems that the motorcycle riders in Kathmandu do not follow traffic rules. During

traffic hours, they should silently shut off their motors and push them through the crowded streets in and around Dubar Square and in other crowed areas, as blaring the horn is dangerous, rude, and arrogant. Speeding on one’s motorbike and blaring the horn is perhaps acceptable on bigger elevated traffic streets.

It has no place in crowed streets where walking on foot is the norm. For the safety of all, the motorcyclists should follow traffic rules and have civic sense not to be rude to the pedestrians.

Bob Mitchell, Washington DC, USA

Party leaders

Yadav Khanal’s response, entitled “Mendacious opinion” (THT, April 8), to my earlier

letter on NC and NC (D) unity includes a morally outrageous suggestion that parties,

however corrupt, should be accepted by people just because it is multiparty democracy.

Given the prevalence of such mindset, Dr Sashanka Koirala, as a new enthusiast in NC

politics, faces a stark choice: to be part of the NC, united but marinated in corruption, or to work for establishing the party as a pro-people force.

If he were to opt for the latter, the way to make it happen, despite Khanal’s suggestion, is not by helping the tainted leaders of the two NCs join hands once again. And, as claimed by Khanal, if there are “talented and capable leaders” in the two NCs, presumably also incorrupt, their presence is felt only by the din of their silence, and their servile submission to the sustained indiscretions of their bosses. This would be the stuff Sashanka will have to find and work with.

As to how the UK and US should be rooting for the people, as robust democracies, they themselves know it best. But one way of doing so in impoverished Nepal is not to root for the corrupt leaders whose equivalents in those countries would have been shown the door

long ago.

Bihari Krishna Shrestha,

Lalitpur