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The half-yearly ‘progress report’ of KP Sharma Oli government is far from sat­isfactory. Some of the progress­es enlisted by the prime minis­ter can at best be described as incomplete. Take for instance the credit for dismantling the ‘syndicates’ in public transport. Suspicions are rife. Have the syn­dicates been replaced with some­thing better? Or has his Minister of Transport quietly allowed the status quo to remain? In the past few weeks, we have also seen public anger across the country over higher local taxes. There have been pro­tests, sit-ins and relay hunger rallies opposing higher taxation without corresponding improve­ment in services.

If you listen to people close to the government, they will tell you that they are under attack from the opposition, civil society, international community and the media. They see a similar narra­tive emerging from all fronts and suspect there is concerted effort to discredit the government.

When you raise the question of delivery, they will tell you that they have done more in six months compared to what the previous governments achieved in the same period; and they blame the ailing system of governance for slow progress on other fronts. I don’t think you can disagree on the last two points, yet the fact remains—unlike previous govern­ments, this one enjoys a two-third majority in the parliament and that people are thus entitled to expect more.

Structural problem

The problem lies in the inability or unwillingness, or both, to fine-tune government structures and processes—even six months after assuming the office. Clearly the existing executive structure and processes aren’t serving the twin government purpose of imple­menting the constitution and delivering prosperity.

The current civil service system, put in place in 1950s, has seen very little revision. While over 50 different committees have been formed to recommend reforms in the intervening years, many of those recommendations were never implemented. Compared to 1950s, the government today has a larger role in the society; the nature of public policy problems as well as modes of interventions are constantly undergoing chang­es; and the rapid technological innovations have added complex­ities to governance processes—often requiring instant actions. Add to this the new federal con­text of Nepal.

For these reasons, the feder­al government needs to go back to drawing boards and rearticu­late its mission and vision before thinking about the workforce, structure and processes.

Agenda for reform

Reform must be performance driven and it must begin at the top. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) appears to be overstaffed and underworked. Sure it needs party officials and loyalists, but it also needs professionals who can bring to bear their exposure from elsewhere to raise the standards. The first step is to clearly delegate roles and responsibilities of the teams at the PMO—dividing them into economic, foreign policy and national security, legislative, pub­lic relations and political manage­ment (including Center-Province relations) teams.

Each team will work with rele­vant ministry, department or tier of government to push through government agenda. Each team as well as each individual in these teams would be assessed on their performance on a peri­odic basis. As I argued in this space (July 20-26 edition) before, a designated Chief of Staff should ideally oversee their perfor­mance. This sort of set-up would be immensely helpful for the gov­ernment to deliver on its promises in a timely manner.

The government is currently behind on drafting several laws required to implement the consti­tution. If there were a functioning legislative team at the PMO, it would have been its responsibil­ity to work with Ministry of Law to ensure a timely submission of draft laws to the parliament. The economic team for its part would have already facilitated the formation of natural resourc­es and fiscal commission—there­by clarifying much of confusion and anger surrounding excessive taxes. In a functioning system, each team would have their daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly agendas cut out—offering a tangible basis for success.

Under the current system, it is more misses than hits. It could stay that way for the remainder of the government’s tenure, if they do not get to work on mod­ernizing its structure and pro­cesses immediately. And if NCP officials don’t want anti-incum­bency and underperformance to mar their chances of another term, they better get down to the business of modernizing the gov­ernment with urgency.

‘There is no such thing as a free lunch’. It’s a saying that means you do not get any­thing for free in this world. But recently I, my mother, and some of her friends, got a free dinner.After watching a wonderful perfor­mance by Andre Rieu in Maastricht, The Netherlands, broadcast live into a local cinema in Scotland, we had booked a table at a nearby, middle of the road but well respected, restau­rant called The Bothy (Scottish name for a small hut used for refuge in a storm on a mountain). At the end we wanted to pay our bills separately. Normally in Kathmandu the waiter would then get a calculator out and start asking what we each had, tick­ing it off the bill as he went.

But not so in this paperless restau­rant! Aside from the very off-hand manager who said he was ‘too busy’ to do this (and who really got our heckles up), it seemed impos­sible to simply tick items off the bill without involving the com­puterised till. A special code from employee X was required. Then it seemed the card reader required another authorization code from employee Y. By this time 15 min­utes had passed and we were no closer to paying the bill. Finally, the card reader simply refused to work. We could almost see the smoke coming out of the machine as it scratched its electronic head!

At this point the owner, who had somehow become involved, said the computerized system was not built to cope with changes once the orig­inal information was fed in. In exas­peration she gave herself authority to write off our meal. A free dinner! We were quite relieved the matter was now resolved as we had things to do that evening. But we were also concerned that the restaurant lost out on quite a bit of money because the paperless system was inflexible.

This incident brought to mind a picture of Nepali politicians sitting in a meeting with their brand new Macbook Pro laptops. Presumably because the Nepal Government is set to go paperless. There are a lot of things that can be said here such as: are all politicians computer lit­erate (after using a laptop for about 15 years my skills are still pretty near zero), can they type in Nepali (which I believe is a skill in itself), or are they working in English (a second language in which few will be fluent)? But mainly my thoughts go out to those who are trying to move their case (landpapers/mar­riages/ passports/ citizenships/birth registration, etc) around the many government departments.

Do we all need to have access to computers now? What about those who either cannot afford a com­puter, lack the skills, or live in an area which does not have access to such things or even access to inter­net or electricity? What happens when remote area (ex VDC office—and what is a local government office called these days anyway?) meets central government?

Currently if you want to find a file in a government office that you filed some time back, there is a helpful peon who knows exactly what room and what pile of folders your file is in. What happens when this is on some equivalent of the Cloud? Taxes have been submitted on-line for quite some time now. But of course, in the end, taxpayers end up in the tax office in person any way. How are they going to avoid similar sce­narios in every department?

Remember the breathalysers that were handed out to the police some time back? What happened to them? (And don’t even think about the health risks involved in breathing into the officer’s face.) Will those lovely Macbook Pros go the same way as the breathalysers?

Yes, going paperless could well result in a lot of free dinners!

My mom had been hospital­ized and the doctors said she needed to insert a fistula in case dialysis was urgently needed. I went to the pharmacist with the pre­scription for the fistula set. And the set included, among other things, four pairs of surgical gloves. Gloves? I couldn’t believe it! Never had it occurred to me that gloves, which doctors use all the time, needed to be sponsored by the patients. I asked the pharmacist if it was really required and he said the set con­tained all those items. I got angry and told the nurse in attendance to pass my message to the doctors that I was ready to donate masks and caps too. Aren’t gloves primary items needed for medical persons (although I hardly see nurses wearing them) when attending any patient?

Talking about ‘taking care of the patients’—sometimes I wonder if we go to hospital to be treated or to be infected. I had gone for my prenatal checkup in one famous hospital in Kathmandu. The toilets around the gynecological depart­ment were awful. First, the com­mode was not clean; the seats were all dirty. I looked for toilet papers to wipe the seat. There was none. And then I realized there was no trash can either. Even government schools in Nepal, however poor they may be, keep trash cans in girls’ toilets. I wondered how women could visit such hospitals during their periods. I got out of the toilet to wash my hands, and there was no soap either.

Once, I had gone to see a gyne­cologist at her private clinic in Kath­mandu. I was advised to get a urine test. When I entered the toilet, there was hardly a spot where I could plant my feet without letting them get extra wet. It was a clinic run by a woman who has children. She could be sensitive to other women’s needs. But nope, she did not care about the cramped waiting area or about the money that she would happily keep in her purse, without giving a receipt. Tax evasion you know! But who lets this apathy go unchecked?

I was once hospitalized in the US. After spending three nights, I was discharged. A couple of days later, I got a phone call from the hospital. It was a phone survey on how the hospital took care of me. I was asked questions like: Did the nurse sanitize their hands before attending to you? Did they put on fresh gloves? Did you like the food you were given? Did they change bed sheets?

Yes, it might be too much for us in Nepal to expect these services avail­able in developed countries. But on second thought, why not? Following a good global practice, and one that does not cost much, shouldn’t be a big deal.

Private hospitals in Nepal are expensive and there is no effec­tive insurance system in place. As a result the majority of the costs need to be borne by the patients themselves. Yes, there have been a few progressive chang­es (made by the government) such as provision of free dialysis but charging patients for basic hospital supplies like gloves—which are in fact vital for the attendants’ health too—is simply immoral!

Action/Adventure

THE MEG

CAST: Jason Statham, Rainn Wilson, Li Bingbing, Winston Chao

DIRECTION: Jon Turteltaub

1 and half stars

When I first saw the trailer of ‘The Meg’ I thought it was a reboot of ‘Jaws’, the popular monster shark-film series. However, it’s a Chinese-American coproduction that has got noth­ing to do with the series and is instead based on a novel of Ameri­can writer Steve Alten. Action star Jason Statham is Jonas Taylor, a deep-sea rescue diver, who has to fight a predatory shark of massive and mythical proportions. If you’re an action film buff, the mere mention of Jason Statham versus a shark will make you anticipate a scene where Statham is punching the animal with his bare hands. So seeing Statham’s heroics mostly restricted to just pushing buttons and staring through screens make us won­der why the star’s tough-as-nails demeanor has been underused in a monster movie that could’ve done with a lot more of the regular Statham-ness.

For once, ‘The Meg’ isn’t a dramatically deep and existential­ist underwater exploration movie where the lead actor gets a chance to show his inner Daniel Day-Lewis. It is a full-blown potboiler, packed in with so many layers of storyline that it stretches into a slack and boring affair without inspiring any moments of suspense or high tension.

The story begins somewhere off-coast in China at a high-tech deep sea research center run by a team of scientists looking for life beyond the bottom surface of earth’s deep­est point, Mariana Trench. Winston Chao plays Dr Zhang, the leader of the research team, and Rainn Wilson plays Morris, the Ameri­can billionaire who has funded the operation. When the film opens, Morris is visiting the place for the first time. As Dr Zhang and his daughter Suyin (Li Bingbing) give him the grand tour of the place, a three-crew submarine explor­ing the bottom Mariana Trench encounters a massive deep sea creature and loses contact.

They waste no time in locat­ing the washed out deep sea res­cue diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) and asking for his help to get the submarine team out of the bot­tom of the ocean. Meanwhile the scientists at the research center assess whether or not they have angered a monster which appears to be a megalodon, the prehistoric 60-foot shark believed to be extinct a long time ago.

Director Jon Turteltaub does not offer anything new to the genre. The film’s overall aim appears to be a children-friendly family enter­tainer so many sequences don’t so much shock and awe but only try to please the crowd.

The CGI is average too. There aren’t any exciting moments that leap at you or catch you off-guard. For the majority of the film you just sink in your seats and watch the mechan­ical storytelling unfold. Even when the titular monster Meg makes an on screen appear­ance, it fails to stir mayhem and dread. The monster shark deserved a better development. Revealing its monstrosity through just expository dialogues does nothing to make the creature scar­ier when the visuals don’t comple­ment the verbal build up.

Besides Statham’s scowls and frowns that make up his rusty per­formance, the rest of the film’s international cast comes across as if they signed up to the project for the paycheck not because they found their characters interesting. Li Bingbing’s Suyin is so incon­sistently written that we see her quickly switch from someone who is skeptical of Statham’s Jonas for his rash methods to someone who is swept off her feet as soon as she sees Jonas’ ripped body. There are many deliberate moments to romantically involve Jonas and Suyin but each of these moments feels forced and out of sync with the overall movie.

‘The Meg’ is a big budget movie with low energy and no refreshing ideas to make it stand out. This is the kind of film which would’ve worked better with a focused story and edgier thrills. In its current shape, it doesn’t have the teeth to grab the audience till the end!