Divided we lose
With over 70 confirmed deaths from floods and landslides over the past one week, it may be hard to see how the early warning systems installed on the rivers of the Tarai region could have worked. But most of them did. On their basis, the flood forecasting division of the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology had sent countless flood alerts when rainfall had started crossing dangerous levels in parts of the Tarai in the second week of July. These alerts were broadcast over FM and TV stations, social media and even sent as SMS to those living in flood-prone areas. And yet there was such widespread death and destruction. What
went wrong?
One surprising hindrance to effective long-range communication in Nepal is its unfinished transition from a unitary state to a federal one. There is still no clarity about the distinct functions and responsibilities of each of the three tiers of the government, nor a clear channel of communication from the center to the federal level, or vice versa. Effective flood-control, as Lin Ning argues in an article for APEX this week, is a centralized affair. A central nodal agency must be able to clearly coordinate and communicate with all the affected provinces.
But there is little or no coordination between the two levels in Nepal. It is thus not surprising that most SMS flood alerts sent from Kathmandu to vulnerable Tarai residents never reached them. Another problem has been with the elevated infrastructures built along the border by India, resulting in inundation in Nepal during the monsoons. There are joint commissions to address this kind of issue, but to no avail. The Indians in these commissions seem lukewarm. The Nepalis there, not plucky enough to strongly make their case.
Regional mechanisms like the SAARC Disaster Management Center in Gujarat have been of limited help as well. At a time when a high level of regional coordination is needed to collectively fight the ravages of climate change, even existing regional climate bodies are withering on SAARC’s deathbed. Nepal blaming India for high border infrastructures while the Indian news channels chide Nepal for opening the sluice gates of the Koshi Barrage to flood Bihar will take us nowhere. This is a multifaceted problem. Installing good early warning systems is just a start.
Political order and authority in Nepal
When the issue of government flip-flop on testing pesticides level on imported Indian vegetables flared up earlier this month, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli apologized for misleading the public about an Indian Embassy letter, and for implying that the government acted on its own when it reversed its earlier stance on the matter. He blamed civil servants and his ministers for keeping him in the dark about the Indian letter. This is not the first instance an elected prime minister of this country has rued about being misinformed, and his inability to get things done and govern, and this certainly will not be the last time.
All governments since 1990 have ignored the fundamental problem of governance in Nepal: the failure to accumulate power in state organs and in subsequent institution building for the use of this power. Instead, they all focused on leveraging the power they individually had to reward supporters—in the process weakening even the few institutions that had been built by past authoritarian regimes.
The legitimate coercive power of the Nepali state has hence been limited even in the best of times. Government authority simply does not emanate from a piece of paper. It is instead earned and accumulated through its use over time through instruments of trust, fear, or both.
While most states excel in one or the other, or both, the Nepali state has never been particularly good at either. There is little trust in state institutions or leaders who preside over them. Hence the continuous opposition to government efforts to exercise its prerogatives—from the Guthi Bill to the decision to host the IIFA awards.
As government leaders wonder why they can’t even move a needle with their two-thirds mandate, perhaps reading Samuel P. Huntington’s seminal book, ‘Political Order in Changing Societies,’ written nearly six decades ago, could be instructive.
To govern and govern well, a society needs strong political institutions to define and realize public interests. But political institutions have “moral as well as structural dimensions… morality requires trust; trust involves predictability; and predictability requires regularized and institutionalized patterns of behavior,” writes Huntington.
The behaviors of our institutions are predictable in a sense that they can be trusted to make decisions or appointments that serve private interest of the leaders—which are clearly amoral and offer no public good. Hence there is opposition even to decisions made with the best of intent. The past is seen as an indicator of the future.
That is largely true. Successive prime ministers and ministers compete to outdo his/her predecessors and the resultant vicious cycle delivers repeated blows to our institutions as new sets of leaders, or rather recycled ones, come in rather frequently—leaving the institutions in tatters. This is evident in ambassadorial appointments to the behavior of leaders in the country’s oldest university. Who appoints them and how? What is their goal once they occupy these high offices?
The biggest challenge for us as a society is to persuade government leaders, civil servants, and politicians to distinguish their individual interest from institutional interest. While to suggest that leaders not pursue private interest at all would be utopian, they should do so without compromising larger institutional interests they preside over. Leave the office you occupy better than what you came into. In other words, educating leaders about individual legacy—not inheritance for the family—can be a good starting point.
Given how appointments are made, or to put it more bluntly, paid for, and inherent unpredictability of the tenure or term of appointment, the overwhelming drive among public officials is to recuperate the investment and leverage the position for personal gain before their time is up. With collection of such individuals in the key governing structures, one wonders how anything that promotes public good gets done in this country.
It will be an uphill battle to change the structure and culture even if we are lucky enough to have an enlightened leadership committed to a complete overhaul. This can start through a discourse around how to fix things, and by intellectuals affiliated to political parties speaking truth to power. Unfortunately, that is becoming a very high bar in even matured democracies—as social media form echo chambers that reinforce your worldviews rather than create informed public spheres
Peking roast duck in Kathmandu
An old Chinese saying goes, “Different lands and waters nurture different people.” As China’s territory extends from the cold zone to the tropics, from the Pacific Ocean to the Himalayas and the Gobi Desert, over thousands of years Chinese food has naturally been as varied. According to the simplest method, the food of just the Han Chinese can be divided into four sub-systems: Sichuan cuisine (southwest region), Cantonese cuisine (southern), Huaiyang cuisine (southeast), and Lu cuisine (north). The Chinese love for food and loyalty to the taste of their hometown makes them sensitive to subtle differences in taste. “Chinese stomach” is a term used to describe the physiological reaction of a Chinese who has been deprived of Chinese food for a long time. Its main manifestations are bad temper, lack of concentration, and interest in nothing. My wife and I are both Han Chinese. If we analyze the reasons for our quarrels at home, the argument about “Sichuan or Lu food” is always Number 1.
I arrived in Kathmandu at a time the Chinese were waging a national debate on social media about whether to add sugar or salt sauce to Doufunao (a kind of very soft tofu). In this, my first long-term job abroad, I found the Chinese food has grown new branches and flowers abroad. In Kathmandu, you can eat Southeast Asian Chinese food, you can eat Indian Calcutta Chinese food, and you can even eat Chinese steamed buns (Dai Po) that may have been brought to Nepal from Southwest China, Myanmar and the southern foothills of the Himalayas. When the Chinese people go to these overseas Chinese restaurants, they have indescribable experiences that are both familiar but also different.
The Big Bang Theory, an American TV series, loved by many Chinese viewers, has takeaway scenes from a Chinese restaurant. After research by curious viewers, this Chinese restaurant has become one of the most popular in the US. When Chinese netizens went to the US to try the food from this Chinese restaurant, most of them were surprised that the Chinese food here was so different to the food they grew up with.
The same is true in Kathmandu. Peking roast duck is a famous delicacy in Beijing. The three most important parts of the dish are the roast duck, the semi-transparent pancake used to wrap the duck meat, and the sweet bean sauce. Once I ordered Peking roast duck at a Chinese restaurant in Kathmandu owned by an overseas Chinese. When the dish was brought, I was shocked: the duck was not roasted on firewood, the pancake was thick and stiff, and even the sauce was cranberry sauce. The restaurant manager politely asked me how I felt about the dish. My reply embarrassed him.
Not just Chinese food. When traveling to unfamiliar places in China, I tend to choose well-known chain restaurants because I think they have good “quality control” and consistent prices. When I came to Kathmandu, my principle was broken, because even at international fast food chains in Kathmandu, the chicken nuggets are more spicy and saltier than what you get from the same chains in Beijing!
Many Chinese restaurants in Kathmandu are not authentic Chinese. Yes, but so what? What is authentic Chinese food? Chinese civilization has a 5,000-year history. Do we eat the same food as the ancients? Sichuan cuisine is famous for its spicy flavor, but remember that chilies, native to South America, didn’t go global until after the great age of sailing.
I used to be able to argue indefinitely with dissenters even over a small issue. In recent years, I suddenly feel there are no right or wrong answers to many things. What is the best? What is suitable for you is the best, and what is suitable for the local people is the right choice. Why do I have this idea? Maybe I’m getting old.
There is a famous dish in Sichuan cuisine—boiled meat slices. Traditionally, the main ingredients have been beef or fish. Since I respect the customs and religious beliefs of the local people, I never order this dish when I invite my Nepali friends to dinner. One day I was having dinner with Nepali friends at a Chinese restaurant. The head chef there was happy to tell me that, through experiments, they had succeeded in making boiled meat slices from pork. After the chef’s introduction, my Nepali friends tried the pork version. They loved it, and I thought it was just as delicious as the boiled slices of the more traditional stuff.
You see, that’s a good example of how different lands and waters nurture different Chinese food. Any culture that can continuously evolve and adapt to the objective environment is a culture with vitality. The Chinese food is no exception. Only thus can a civilization preserve the essence of its culture and make it a bridge of understanding with other civilizations.
I should get going now. My wife is cooking tonight. I better start cleaning the vegetables if I want good food.
The author is chief correspondent of the Kathmandu office of Shanghai Wen Hui Daily. He has a Masters in international relations.
Conserve water, South Asia!
June 11 is the date for the arrival of the monsoon in Nepal. This year, there was no sign of rain on the 11th. The days ticked by as we looked at the skies, increasingly anxious about the oppressive feeling in the air. A cyclone predicted to hit the coast of Gujarat moved away to the ocean, and was blamed for sucking rain away from the mainland. No one—meteorologists, climate change specialists, Indian scientifc community, NASA—seemed to know why the monsoon was delayed. As the drought worsened, maps started to appear on Twitter, showing how far the monsoon should have moved across the subcontinent by late June. Most Indian states which should have received rain had seen weak rainfall or none at all.
The briefest shower I have ever seen in Kathmandu washed away the dust on the leaves of my curry tree plant on June 17. The rain lasted fve minutes. On Asar 15 ( June 30), we saw photographs of people planting rice in what looked like well-irrigated terraces. Mud-happy people stuck rice seedlings into the ground. For a Twitter moment, all seemed well.
For most urban dwellers running around on motorcycles, rain is an inconvenience that floods them in badly planned cities. Urban floods are an annual occurrence in cities like Mumbai. But “floods” and “droughts” are two sides of the same coin. For a continent that should recharge during rainy season and withdraw water during dry season, we tend to waste our precious water during monsoon in dirty, uncontrollable floods, and cry foul during dry season when another state or area which has better managed its resources refuses to give us its precious hoard.
South Asia has also adopted the electric underground pump with a vengeance—most of us get our drinking water from rained groundwater reservoirs. But South Asians in general are not known for frugal use of water. We extract massive amounts from our finite reservoirs with no thought for the future. We leave the tap turned on because there are no consequences from government or community.
Chennai, a city of estimated 12 million people, has run dry. The alarming news that this major city in India had run out of water first became evident through satellite photographs posted by NASA, which showed before and after photographs of Puzhal Lake from 2018 and 2019. The four rained reservoirs in Chennai were operating at a 0.2 capacity. Thecity, the NASA article notes, “has been devoid of rain for almost 200 days.”
An article by Nidhi Jamwal in ‘The Wire’ on June 27, titled “Not Just Chennai, India’s Drought Situation Is Far Worse Than We Realize” quotes the South Asian Drought Monitor: “more than 44% area of the country is facing drought-like conditions, of which over 17% is facing ‘severe dry’ conditions.”
On June 23, I read an article titled ‘Amid growing crisis, Madhya Pradesh may become first state to introduce Right to Water Act’ on the India Water Portal. The language of rights has always interested me, not the least in ways South Asians demand rights without also realizing it comes with responsibilities.
So I posted this on Twitter: In India too, the talk is all about “rights” but nothing about “responsibilities.” Not even basic water conservation steps like turning off taps, not overusing tubewells (I’ve seen these left gushing in India), just plain old abuse of water is not addressed.
India wastes massive amount of water, not the least for irrigation where farmers turn on an electric motor and leave the water gushing for hours on end. This waste is fueled by cheap electricity subsidies. As the July 1 op-ed “To handle water crisis, overhaul irrigation” by Joydeep Gupta in India Climate Dialogue pointed out, this must be replaced by the more efficient drip-irrigation system which pinpoints and directs water directly to the roots of the plant instead of flooding the entire field. He also advocates a move away from water intensive crops like rice towards barley and millets that are water efficient.
The language describing this crisis as “drought” and “climate change” removes human agency and turns the manmade environmental disaster into an abstract natural catastrophe. Yet we are very much to blame. By we, I mean government policies that have prioritized pumps over indigenous methods of recharge, and forest clearcutting for mining companies instead of reforestation. By we, I mean cities which have paved every single inch with asphalt and turned urban spaces into barren deserts. By we, I mean users who over-pump underground reservoirs with no thought of the future.
It is clear that the Prime Minister’s Offce in India is now taking the water conservation issue seriously. On June 30, PM Modi urged people to conserve every drop of water and create a database of people involved in the indigenous water conservation.
This is the first step in acknowledging wasteful use of water is a cause of India’s water emergency. India needs to move towards a national and regional policy which prioritizes reforestation, river conservation, groundwater stewardship, rainwater harvesting, and wells and ponds revival. Is South Asia, as a region, prepared for such a massive crisis? India and Pakistan continue to battle onwards with manufactured military crisis in Kashmir that eat away at their treasuries. So successful has this strategy been for political domination in each country that nobody—not least the political elites—seem willing to put it aside for the real issues, including water, besetting the subcontinent. India needs to sink a few million recharge wells into its cities and villages, but most of the money is siphoned off to buy clunky, decommissioned military hardware from Russia and France instead.
South Asia cannot afford a drought. We are a continent of a billion and a half people dependent on rain-fed agriculture. The crops may fail this year, and we need to plan. The alternative— South Asian governments’ apathy—is too terrifying to imagine. Without rain to recharge these underground water dhukuti, we are looking not just at an abstract “monsoon defcit” but a humanitarian crisis. India must stop its BIMSTEC nonsense and immediately come onboard SAARC again. The very first issues the South Asian region must discuss is how to resolve the water and upcoming food shortage crisis.
