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We Nepalis have always dreamt of being ruled by visionary leaders assisted by disciplined and competent governance machinery. But what we got is the exact opposite. We have become a nation ruled by conflict mongering, criminal-minded and incompetent politicians who are assisted as enthusiastically in ruining the nation by the inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. Political instability and an endless transition has made things worse.

To put things in perspective, let me begin with a comparison that came as a shocking eye-opener. Next to the small farmhouse that I am about to launch in my hometown, at a beautiful bhanjyang in the serene village named Chisapani in Waling Municipality, in Syangja district, a community school is being renovated. I spotted the contractor working on the project procuring the best quality tiles and granite slabs at the local hardware store, and some eager enquiries revealed shocking details.

The budget for the school’s toilet block is more than my total budget for the farmhouse. It is more surprising because the primary school has only 26 enrolled students. This seems an atrocious waste of scarce resources that could have been used on other important infrastructures like libraries and books. Such an absurd spending pattern has become a norm across the social sector and in government projects.

Much of this rampage of inflated expenditure in projects is caused by corrupt intent, and an ineffective monitoring and evaluation mechanism. But some sociological and political factors also need exploring while looking for deeper reasons. 

Let me share another example. I work in agriculture, and I am striving hard to initiate evidence-based and data-driven practices in small-scale farming. But at the local level, there are many government bodies one has to coordinate with to get benefits from different schemes targeted at farmers, or even simply to get some data about agriculture.

At the municipality level, the technical agriculture branches of the municipality work under the office of the Municipal Executive, which comprises elected and nominated local representatives. There is hardly any coordination between the district, province, federal and these municipal agencies.

Previously, the government had been providing agricultural extension services through various agriculture service centers and livestock service centers directly controlled by the ministry. But with the rolling out of federalism, the District Agriculture Offices have been closed. 

The government of Nepal had launched a plan to establish Community Agriculture Extension Service Centers (CAESC) under the  Agriculture Development Strategy, a 20-year strategic plan to guide the overall agricultural development of Nepal before the promulgation of the new constitution. It has now been redesigned to suit the federal structure. The Decentralized Science, Technology and Education Flagship program of ADS has a vision of establishment of CAESC in each VDC. But, in practice, things haven't shaped out as planned.

According to a study carried out by the Global Sustainable Research and Development Center, the CAESC’s established in Sindhuli and Rautahat districts have not been implemented effectively. The infrastructure is now used by rural municipality/municipality for their office purposes. As a result, we have dozens of government agencies in the district with no coordination with each other. When I strive to base our decisions on some reliable data about agricultural production, it seems like mission impossible.

Our politics, for the past three decades, has thrived on conflict mongering. As a result, our politicians have hardly any experience on governance. The result of the past four years, at different levels of our government, proves their ineptitude to prioritize correctly. While the federal government was incapacitated with the battle of egos of main leaders, the provincial and local governments have initiated some really laughable projects.

The country has a plethora of stupid projects as the mayors seem to be in a race to win the title of the stupidest politician. One municipality had cut down a healthy tree in a road-crossing to erect a concrete statue of a fruit, and many others have spent crores of rupees on view towers, concrete statues of animals, vegetables and even liquor bottles. One municipality recently spent more than Rs 2 million in building statues of cauliflowers and potatoes. That amount could have been utilized in establishing a research and advisory center to help farmers. 

Combined with this senseless anarchy led by our criminal-minded rulers, who are amply assisted by an inefficient governance structure, we as a society are also playing our part. Let's face it: unless we stop being tolerant of inefficient practices and unless we start ridiculing corruption in our family gossip, our children will face such endless injustice again and again.

It's high time we forced our government to spend the taxpayer money more efficiently.

Whichever way the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is finally settled in Nepal, whether Parliament ratifies, rejects, or amends it, the dust storm from its debate will take a long time to die down. 

The United States offered Nepal $500 million in grants for the construction of transmission lines and strategic roads through the MCC. It was meant to be a transformative deal: a grant large enough to unlock important development chokepoints in Nepal. Instead, the MCC agreement has been mired in a debilitating national debate, even forcing senior MCC officials to visit Nepal last week.

On September 8, a day before Fatema Z. Sumar, vice president at MCC, was due to arrive in Kathmandu for consultations on the agreement, Prime Minister Deuba told a meeting of his parliamentary party that there was “no need to politicize the matter.”

Just before Sumar left Kathmandu on September 12, she told the press that “MCC was being politicized,” and that “economic assistance should never be made a political weapon.”

The debate around the MCC is, no doubt, wrapped in politics. But if unpacked, that political debate offers important lessons that could help Nepal overcome its development challenges.

The forgotten project

The debate on MCC rapidly degenerated into a discussion of the terms of the agreement, and whether it represented a defence alliance or was part of the US’s Indo-Pacific Strategy. The merits and long-term impacts of the underlying project—cross border transmission lines with India—were ignored.

A precondition to the MCC grant was that Nepal sign an agreement with India for the Butwal-Gorakhpur cross-border transmission line. Last week, on September 10, Nepal Electricity Authority and Power Grid Corporation of India signed an agreement to jointly invest in the Indian side of the line (120 km of the 135 km line falls in India).

Cross border electricity trade cuts both ways. If Nepal can export electricity to India, then India could also export power to Nepal. In the long term, Nepal may be unable to compete in Indian power markets, thus shutting down the potential for large-scale hydropower development in Nepal and increasing Nepal’s dependence on Indian power imports.  

MCC has argued otherwise. In an editorial in Republica on Oct 3, 2019, the US ambassador to Nepal, Randy Berry, was unequivocal. “The MCC project,” he wrote, “focuses on constructing lines that will bring Nepal’s power to the consumers who will pay Nepal good money for it.  It is a simple fact of geography and economics that means India.”

In another 10 years, Ambassador Berry may not be here to see whether India has paid Nepal “good money” for its power. But Nepal’s intelligentsia will still be here. They may come to rue debating an agreement for a project whose impacts hadn’t been fully considered in the first place.

Political accountability

As painful and political as the debate may have been, the best thing MCC did was to require the agreement to be ratified by parliament. The question we should ask now is why other international grants and borrowing are not subject to the same oversight and approval from parliament.

Over the last five years, Nepal’s public debt has increased significantly, and is now projected to reach 47 percent by the end of the fiscal year. International borrowing accounts for a large share of that debt. Of course, Nepal needs to borrow for development and investment. It has space to borrow more.

But within this space for borrowing, many of Nepal’s donors are failing to consider whether their development grants or loans are in fact truly beneficial to Nepal. This is accelerating the government’s rush to borrow (or be gifted with a grant) and spend, without focusing adequately on prioritizing productive investments and quality implementation.

As Sumar said, “economic assistance should never be made a political weapon.” But the tragedy in Nepal is that easy availability of foreign financing is fuelling the government’s lethargy, patronage, corruption, and politicization of everything.

Fortunately, MCC requires the parliament’s intervention. Nepalis must trust their parliament to make the right decision, including on MCC and other development projects. After all, we elected them to make those decisions. But we must also urge Nepal’s donors to be attentive to the aspirations of Nepali citizens as we work to build our young democracy.

We cannot hold our politicians accountable, make our governments efficient and responsive if they are always flush with donor cash for projects that may not even be needed.    

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In my last column, I had talked about how we impose on grieving families “the right way” to grieve or to do the final rituals at the ghat or a funeral place. Though I concluded by saying that sometimes silence and space are all we can give to people/family who have lost their loved ones, there are still a few things to consider post-cremation or entombment.

Every religion has its own books on how many days the family should grieve. Hindus have 13 days of mourning plus one year of different pujas that need to be done. Nowadays, families are becoming more and more progressive and rational and are trying to finish the pujas within the 13 days. It is an individual choice and decision of the family and relatives. The 13 days is the time people visit the mourning family and express their condolences. It has become a regular practice in Hindu culture.

A couple of years ago, I was shocked when someone asked me not to eat at the mourning family’s house. Since then I have noticed that a lot of people actually don’t eat at these places. Forget eating, they don’t even drink water. Maybe some religious theory, some enlightened being must have chanted and is followed from generation to generation. I asked a lot of people why they don’t eat or drink at these houses and the only close to convincing explanation was: Back in the days people died from epidemics or some communicable disease, the doubt was that the family house might be contaminated. So this might be the only practical way to stop the disease from spreading. As people would do anything if told from a religious point of view, this was induced in the rituals and religious practice.

A couple of years ago, my best friend’s grand-mom passed away. At that time her father was in a reputed government position, so a lot of people visited her place to give their condolences. As per the Nepali culture, you must take a lot of fruits while visiting the family because apparently for the mourning 13 days you must eat satvik khana and fill yourself with fruits. In this case too, the family distributed those fruits to orphanages and old homes and still, there were baskets full of rotten fruits every second day we were throwing away. Again these fruits had entered the family house and were “untouchable” and so could not be given away to extended family and friends. Two rooms were filled with fruits and for the next six months, the family did not even take one bite of any. 

That time I promised myself I will take anything but fruits to a grieving family. After years of trial and error, I have come up with my own condolence visit pack. It consists of a small bottle of ghee (as everything is cooked in that for the 13 days and so it will be properly used), a packet of sugar which won’t spoil for couple of months, teabags, and incense sticks as they will be used every day for next one year. If I am close to the family, I take a bit of grocery too. 

One appreciable practice I have noticed in India is friends collecting cash and giving it to the deceased family. We all know hospital bills are unbelievably expensive, funerals are costly and if you are Hindu, the 13 days of rituals will only add to the burden. Probably this is a little we can do to ease the family’s financial burden.

I have noticed we have our own ways of grieving. Personally, I like to be alone while I am mourning. I am not a religious person so my prayers consist of wishing for peace and nirvana for the departed soul. But my family and extended families prefer to pray in mass with religious chanting and bringing in religious gurus. As we have different temperaments even with grieving, frankly I don’t like people coming and lamenting at my loss. I want them to behave normally. I wish to cherish the memories I have with the deceased person rather than feel sad over the loss. Maybe this is my way of handling my loss. And I do request my family and friends not to go to a mourning family and keep reminding them about the beloved person. I am not indicating that you should holler at the awkward situation but at least we can have a regular conversation instead of crying and making it worse for the family. 

Grieving is a process and we should let the family take their time. In the end there is no other choice than acceptance. 

It sounds harsh but it’s the sad truth: the heaps of waste troubling Kathmanduites demonstrate ultimate lack of responsibility, not of the municipal authorities but of the citizenry itself. Kitchen waste has to be managed by the household. It should be the bottom line of a civilized and hygienic urban living. Period.

Kathmandu still behaves like a captured city. The city’s locals—the Newa people and the other communities that came along with the Gorkha rulers during the unification—are the so-called ‘raithane’ Kathmanduites. But the major chunk of the population living in the city is comprised of those who have migrated from outside, either temporarily or permanently. Many of them live in rented rooms, often students and young boys and girls sharing a single room with improvised kitchen facilities.

This situation has made the city an equivalent of a large slum, or at best, a disorganized concrete settlement. It has little of what a modern city should have. Unrestricted construction activities and municipal solid waste production have made the city unlivable, and the volume of single-use plastics, rising for decades, has also soared since the start of the pandemic.

The recycling business in Nepal is dependent on small-scale disorganized Indian collectors. Recently, there have been some creative attempts by some social entrepreneurs to tackle the issue, but kitchen waste is left completely at the mercy of the households or the municipal collection system. And that has been a cause of continuous trouble.

As a result, the best some youngsters with activist streak could think about after heaps of garbage piled up in Kathmandu was to throw waste-filled polybags in front of the mayor’s office. But there’s hardly been an attempt from the citizenry to think of other ways to clean up this mess.

Kitchen waste is easily manageable, and can even become a source of income. Some examples shared as success stories by the UN Environment Program could give us a great way out of this mess.

A few years ago, roadsides and canals filled with stinking garbage were threatening Indian coastal city Alappuzha’s status as a tourist destination as well as exposing residents and visitors alike to clouds of flies and disease-spreading mosquitoes. Protests by local residents had led to the closure of the city’s main landfill site in 2014.

Since then, the city in the eastern state of Kerala—dubbed “the Venice of the East” for its network of backwaters and coastal lagoons where tourists can rent houseboats—has addressed the problem by introducing a decentralized waste management system. This separates biodegradable waste at ward level, treats it in small composting plants, and provides many of its 174,000 residents with biogas for cooking.

Another example is Ljubljana in Slovenia. As the first European capital to aim for zero waste, Ljubljana is reaping multiple benefits from its commitment to cutting-edge waste management. While some countries have opted for incineration to control landfill, the Slovenian city has chosen to maximize recycling and reduction.

After more than a decade of improvement and education, Ljubljana has one of the highest rates for the separate collection and recycling of waste in Europe—over 60 percent. That performance helped it secure the European Commission’s Green Capital award in 2016. It has also banned cars from its center, revived its parks, and helped Slovenia become a sustainable tourist destination.

A key step has been to collect separated waste directly from people’s homes. Biodegradable and recyclable waste is collected more frequently, encouraging people to separate diligently to prevent it from piling up (and beginning to smell). The city is also running information campaigns to promote reduction, re-use and responsible consumption to curb the amount of stuff people throw away. Reducing food waste is a particular target.

The results are impressive: the quantity of recovered materials rose from 16 kg per person in 2004 to 145 kg in 2014; the amount sent to landfills fell 59 percent; total waste decreased by 15 percent. The average monthly waste management cost was less than 8 euros per household in 2014—the lowest in the country.

It is high time we start thinking about waste differently in Kathmandu. The key to success is the willingness of households to separate their waste before it is collected. This demands years of awareness-raising including public meetings and door-to-door visits across the city. Knee-jerk reactions and blame shifting activism will not give us a permanent solution.

Throwing plastic bags full of your rotten tomatoes in front of the mayor won't help. We must help our municipalities. The money spent to open more sites to burn or bury rubbish, or to deal with non-recyclable plastic food containers, milk jugs and yogurt cups could go toward building new libraries or hospitals or parks—this new approach is a potential game changer.