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Imagine a quiet village setting. Homesteads made of earthen tiles, bamboo walls caked over with mud, a few affluent homes of baked bricks. It is morning, almost lunchtime, women in the houses are cooking: some using fuelwood, some using dry dung, and some using liquid petroleum gas.

The younger women, the new brides of the village are abuzz, they have a thing planned for today, a place to get to. No, it’s not a religious ceremony, it’s not a festival or a party that brings them together. They have actions that need taking. They have been training, they have been starting businesses and 80 brides of the community are in the process of a big venture—they are planning a cooperative.

There is energy among these young women of the village today. They finish their work and with the blessings of the family elders, they bid farewell to everyone and they stream out of their houses to meet each other.

Six months ago, they and their families joined the FCDO-supported Sahaj program. There were discussions regarding what women can do, how they can help each other, how young people can be taken care of and how they can contribute to their families.

Fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law, husbands and wives, sisters-in-law and the whole family took part in sessions where traditional practices, both positive and negative were discussed, ideas on how to improve the lives of women were generated, tolerance and acceptance, better interrelationships, improved health and sanitation, and income generation were discussed.

After much back and forth, training was held: 92 percent of the women who died during maternity did not make cash incomes, according to recent study by MIRA. And there was consensus that young women had to be more in control of their lives.

They and their families learned about gender rights, potential for violence, how to break the cycle of dependency, and they learned how to make money! Everyone learned business and transactional basics, some trained in tailoring, running ration shops and food stalls, some chose to learn goats, cow or buffalo farming.

This knowledge and their comradery made them confident. The 80 young brides built a network that spanned Siraha and Saptari. They identified need and trained under the local municipality. They sought and received the support of their family and communities, they arranged access to security and phone lines and identified who they could turn to for help within and without their families.

Their fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law, husbands and other member of the family joined them and helped improve their conditions, helped them seek solutions, achieve income generation. Some went back to school, and they achieved a right to self-determination. They took a step beyond and are themselves supporting each other.

The meeting has started, the young women are full of questions. One young bride has a tailoring shop, other brides go to her to get their sewing done. So is the kurta finished, the blouse has a slight problem on the shoulders… sure, everything will be taken care of as soon as possible! Another just started a grocery store, what is the price of a half-liter packet of oil, does she have rice flakes chiura? “Ok, you are offering a much better price, I am coming over to get some stuff.” To the young woman who has a buffalo, “A family celebration is coming up, do you have yogurt?”

Then comes the serious stuff. There is a need to save money. If a collective can be up and running, they can pool together all the monies and then give out loans at decent interest rates so the brides can themselves generate capital to establish and improve their businesses and help those that are in the danger of failing.

Problems are addressed, need for counseling for a specific family, greater learning of gender rights, a husband who is insensitive, a mother-in-law who is supportive, are brought up and solutions arrived at.

Then after the main discussions are over, the facilitator smiles goodbyes, but wait! There is talk of another family where a marriage is taking place. A new bride is coming into the community. The women have ideas on how to welcome her, bring her into their fold, support her in her new community, make sure that her family gives her justice and care.

There is a different feel in the villages now, a coming together of the new and the established. There are actions to take, goals to achieve. There is greater justice for women, especially young women who have left all that they have known to enter a different home, a different family, and a different community. The 80 brides who came into the village wearing bright yellow saris of weddings shine like 80 new suns filled with hope.

Finance Minister Bishnu Prasad Paudel is contributing to economic stagnancy. The price of this is being paid mostly by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). His focus is more on party politics rather than the economy, even though he has been successful in presenting himself as a private sector-friendly finance minister, at least when compared to his predecessor Yubraj Khatiwada. His political acumen perhaps helped him craft this image of an efficient finance minister, but that has hardly been the case. He has neglected the fact that government intervention and support in various sectors are most critical at this difficult time.

The government has reduced capital expenditure for fiscal 2020/21 by nine percent, the reduction attributed mostly to the Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdown and restriction on businesses. Only 15 percent of total budget allocation for national pride projects has been spent in the fiscal’s first six months. These two examples indicate how little has been done so far and what a whole lot remains to be done in the current fiscal. But respective government agencies seem unconcerned, and this is where FM Poudel is missing the opportunity.

Poudel came to the position with no ambition for the economy. Probably, that is why less is expected of him. But history will not be kind to him when it assesses his contribution to steering the economy in these most challenging times. Since his appointment as finance minister in October 2020, he has been successful in boosting the capital market. As he completed his 100 days in the position, the share market soared, even as the productive sector struggled to recover from the pandemic.  

Unlike many of his predecessors, Paudel saw no value in presenting a complementary budget for the current fiscal. But that has led to confusion over possible government help for the hardest hit people and sectors. He has been saddled with a budget that was prepared by Khatiwada, who was not a favorite of the private sector during his stint as finance minister. The country is riveted on its uncertain political future and Paudel is thus being spared for not delivering on the economic front. This, in turn, will be in Paudel’s favor while his success as finance minister is assessed.

What he has achieved so far is negligible compared to the enormous task he has in his hands. For one, he needs to pump more money into productive sectors. But the budget’s mid-term review indicates public sector expenditure is going to remain dismal throughout the fiscal, hampering overall economic growth.

Poudel seems to be good at managing expectations of the private sector and development partners. But he has so far failed to come to the aid of job-seekers and businesses in need of easy access to finance in the pandemic-battered economy. Most of his time is going into managing the country’s political fiasco while his sole focus was supposed to be getting government agencies to maintain high public expenditure to keep the economy afloat in the midst of a looming crisis.

Although most of the economic indicators seem to be okay, there is a deep structural problem in our remittance-driven, consumption-led economy. This was the right time to address that problem in order to boost productive sectors and create more jobs. But as we head towards the end of this fiscal, the fear is that the economy could again re-enter the self-defeating remittance cycle.

Just as we do when talking about domestic politics, hyperboles are the order of the day when discussing international events. We talk of eroding democratic ideals the world over in an age of disinformation and creeping authoritarianism. As it gets harder to separate fact from fiction, people, we see, are plumping for nationalist autocrats who are experts at mining their attention. A newly-rich China is successfully exporting its illiberal ideals near and far. India, our closest friend and neighbor, is sliding towards sectarianism. What hope is there for Nepal, then, precariously lodged between the two?

So PM Oli runs roughshod over the democratic process and the new constitution, with covert support of the Indian establishment, according to some. (Earlier, it was China that was backing him.) Oli seemed to have cemented his hold on power by dissolving the sovereign parliament. The court, apparently, was already in his pockets. The constitution, meanwhile, was headed for a complete failure. Then came the Supreme Court verdict upending all his plans.    

An interesting aspect of the recent anti-Oli protests following his parliament dissolution were the symbols and slogans borrowed from abroad, most recently from Myanmar of all places. After the restoration of democracy in 1990, Nepal has been no stranger to mass anti-government protests. But the Burmese coming out on the streets against the all-powerful military rulers was a rare sight. Reminiscent of Nepal during the second Jana Andolan, Burmese civil servants have refused to work following the most recent military coup in the country as doctors have un-looped their stethoscopes and laborers have downed their tools.

Thailand is another case of an aging ruling establishment being out of step with the globe-trotting youths. Despite the country’s brutal lèse-majesté laws, millions have been protesting against the new monarch, a free-spending playboy who prefers to live in distant Germany. Coming back to India, the raucous democracy of over a billion souls has always been tough to tame. Nor are its civilizational democratic ideals easy to crush. The Modi era, as entrenched as it is, will pass, and sooner rather than later.    

China’s role in the spread of illiberalism can also be overblown. Most of its international relationships are strictly commercial, and not underpinned by any higher ideal. These ties can be sustained only so long as China can keep spending abroad lavishly. Even in Nepal, although we see some influence of Chinese money in our politics, we are far from being Hun Sen’s Cambodia.   

In fact, compared to other countries in the region, Nepal has always been a tolerant society, welcoming of outsiders. Perhaps a part of this owes to our variegated geography, which makes broad cooperation obligatory. In ancient times we acted as a bridge between two great civilizations, and we will continue to do so in greater or smaller capacity. Given our age-old coexistence of diverse faiths and beliefs, nor will it be easy to subdue our egalitarian sprit for any length of time.   

We have a vibrant civil society. New restrictions have been placed on sharing information online and on press freedom, and yet we continue to speak and engage openly. All kinds of innovative businesses are sprouting up, even amid the gloom of the Covid-19 epidemic. We now have motor roads connecting all districts and near ubiquitous access to mobile phones. Absolute poverty is in rapid decline, if only due to remittance. And because we are open by nature, we also continue to learn and adapt from events outside our borders. Our politics cannot but reflect the society we live in.

Three and half years ago, the road in front of the house I lived in at Sanepa, as well as the one next to the school my six-year-old son went to, were dug up for expansion. It was a frustrating experience. A peaceful residential colony with many schools for small children was turned into a dusty construction site for months, causing traffic snarls and sandstorms. It was dusty in the dry season and muddy after rains.

We raised voices, we questioned the authorities, and I even wrote about it in one of my columns then. Still, it did not come as a surprise when authorities said they had run out of budget midway, and the dug up road remained as they were for over a year.

It would of course be too much to expect a 50m stretch of road to be expanded in a day, and that another section would be dug up only after the previous stretch is completed. We do not have a culture of keeping people at the center of planning.

The new constitution, promulgated some years ago after decades of conflict, redefined the state-people relationship: from centralization to decentralization. But that has not changed how authorities treat people. They still behave like rulers, not like service-providers.

Federalism was supposed to shake up this status quo, but it did so only on paper. In reality, the bureaucracy is too obsessed with preserving its power, and is fighting hard to not let go of it. And our politicians are playing dirty games using this character of state mechanisms, and criminal businesses are reaping benefit using both of them.

Disgruntled by the state of our capital, and espying an opportunity to make an impact through the local bodies created after local elections, I jumped in when called by the mayor of my hometown to work as an advisor.

Three years later, at the heart of the town in Waling Municipality in Gandaki Province, the main residential area where around 5,000 live has become a battlefield. The municipality dug up a portion of the Siddhartha Highway that falls in this municipality for expansion two years ago and it hasn’t yet been worked upon due to lack of budget. Authorities in the Road Department have informed in unofficial conversations that the cabinet minister from the constituency, Padma Aryal, has warned them not to undertake any work on the roads that is not initiated by her. The mayor of the municipality, Dilip Pratap Khand, pushed ahead with this highway expansion project, clearly without enough resources at his disposal. The fact that the mayor is from Congress and the minister is from the ruling faction of the NCP has made it a political fight.

While local NCP leaders deny that the budget was withheld at the minister’s instruction and blame the mayor for initiating an insensitive road expansion without enough resources or a definite plan of action, the mayor’s supporters put the blame squarely back on the minister.

A short distance away, in a place called Bhalu Pahad in Putli Bazar Municipality, the Road Department initiated another expansion almost six months ago. It has come out in a local newspaper that the contractors involved were trying to make extra money by selling stones in Pokhara, which in turn is resulting in unnecessary delays in the busy highway, disrupting traffic-flow for five to six hours a day.

As is becoming clear, having a constitution promulgated by an elected assembly of the people is not enough to sort out the issues of governance. People are not at the center of our planning. When Waling residents question about the dusty roads, the mayor answers insensitively, “We have to learn to take pain to gain something”. Such irresponsible attitude has, in fact, been the hallmark of most of our political leaders across the spectrum.

The past three and half years were a steep learning curve for politicians, bureaucrats and people alike. It should have been a golden era of nation-building, development and progress. But looking at how the government, people, the media and the party systems conducted themselves in the years that followed the course the nation took has been disappointing, to say the least. We all learned the wrong tricks and fast.

The useless and senseless political tussles, indifference of the general public, especially the youth, and the haphazard character of our governing mechanisms are taking us to the edge of a cliff.