Lately, there was a clamour in a section of the local press concerning the slander apparently uttered by an Indian TV comedian that Nepalis are born to guard bungalows in India. If this seemed too far-fetched to the self-respecting Nepalis, a local English daily once reported that parents in some hill villages purposively sent their daughters to Indian brothels (THT, September 29, 2003). However unpalatable, these phenomena remain an ugly manifestation of the deep-seated malaise that has chronically and increasingly plagued our national economy.

As things stand, while some 80 per cent of the workforce is “engaged” in agriculture, they contribute less than half that proportion to the nation’s meagre GDP suggesting severe deficits in production and productivity in rural economy. The per capita land availability has declined from a low of 0.6 ha in 1954 to the precarious 0.15 ha in 1998 with a large segment of population being marginal landholders or landless altogether. But the country’s population of 23.2 million (2001), rising at over 2 per cent per year, is now headed to more than 35 million by 2015.

Unemployment and underemployment rates are already too severe, the former at 14 per cent nationally and the latter at 47.5 per cent in the rural areas. The puny non-agricultural sector is clearly unable to absorb this massive labour surplus. The manufacturing sector employs less than 5 per cent of the labour force, one reason being that only 20 per cent of its jobs are for the unskilled. Thus, menial jobs in India have historically acted as the safety valve for our burgeoning labour force. One small recent alternative for our uneducated and unemployed youths has been to join the Maoist ranks where they suddenly find their dreams come true with the power and pelf flowing out of the barrel of the guns they held. The nation’s development plans have clearly failed to deliver.

Various forms of government that ruled the country made little improvement in the situation, basically for want of a sense of accountability of the rulers to the ruled. Even under multiparty dispensation, given the massive illiteracy and poverty of the voters, politicians have to buy votes. A successful politician at the polls in Nepal has always been a corrupt man or woman in most cases. Paradoxically, our representatives have only presided over the steady downhill slide of our socio-economy.

Recently, the working and retired members of the National Planning Commission (NPC) met to review 50 years of planning experience in Nepal.

Like the proverbial nine blind men and the elephant, they cited this reason and that in their bid to exonerate themselves for their individual and collective failure to turn around the country’s increasingly dismal situation. While a few dared also to pontificate, the overall mood was one of shared guilt, with no one claiming to have made any innovative contribution to development.

Planners in Nepal remain an ambivalent lot. In theory, at least, they are chosen for their professional merit, and are expected, based on that strength, to seriously engage with the politicians to bring about positive reforms in the investment and policy regimes of the state. In practice, however, two problems have militated against effective delivery by the NPC.

Firstly, the members are chosen based more on their political connections or trademark, and this makes their life expectancy as planners more or less co-terminous with those of their mentors in the chronically volatile political scene in Nepal. Secondly, most such appointees do not necessarily bring with them a proven ability in planning national development. Instead, most NPC members seem to find greater meaning in indulging themselves in such activities as gracing inaugural functions or the ritualistic launch of a plan document every five years.

If the incumbent body of planners would like to set a more respectable precedent for those to follow, they, despite their known limited life expectancy on the job, must waste no time in pressing for policy reforms at least in one area, i.e. to empower the people at the grassroots to manage their own development. Dipak Gyawali, for instance, lasted only seven months as water resources minister in the 2002 Chand government, but was able to innovate a policy regime that entitled village electricity cooperatives to buy power from the Nepal Electricity Authority in bulk and retail it among their members.

The result was dramatic. Illegal connections disappeared, non-technical leakage diminished, tariff payment became 100 per cent and power supply for them is now cheaper and better. Similarly, a small-time bureaucrat in the NPC was able to get forest user group concept inducted in the forestry rules in 1988 that led to the internationally acknowledged success of community forestry in Nepal.

Shrestha is former joint secretary, NPC