Insensitive Government, Conflicting Donor Agenda, and Emergent NGO Initiatives at the Grassroots

Bihari Krishna Shrestha

Kathmandu, Nepal

“It would be tempting to think that the local cadres, who had more integrity and ability than the current standards, had played the role of catalyst, stimulating enthusiasm and subduing the conflicts and disputes found in any rural society.”
(Gilbert Etienne, Rural Development In Asia, 1985:216)

Introduction: 

THE CONCEPT of local development denotes the development of localities both rural and urban. There exist fundamental differences between the two categories in terms of sociological and economic characteristics, and, therefore, the strategies for their development too would have to differ accordingly.

Given the fact that Nepal is predominantly a rural country, this paper is designed to discuss the strategies of local development as they apply to the rural situation in Nepal.

Geo-Political Imperative for Rural Development in Nepal: 

Despite the on-going rhetoric about rapid progress taking place in the country, Nepal has remained one of the most agricultural and poorest of all the countries in the world. Although 81 percent of population is engaged in it, agricultural production makes less than 50 percent of the country’s GDP which has been stagnating at less than 200 US dollar per capita for years. Whatever dynamics is there in the economy, overall, it has remained increasingly adverse. The population continues to grow at a rapid rate. Agricultural land availability has hit a plateau and is ownership is constantly being fragmented. Agricultural productivity leaves a very wide gap compared to what is attainable. Some 50 percent of population suffer from food deficit conditions that lasts for six months or more in a year. Growth of the non-agricultural sector has been sluggish, and the manufacturing sector does not employ more than 5 percent of the labour force (Shrestha, Bihari K., 1994). External employment involving seasonal and long-term migration is a must for a vast majority of the village households both in the hills and in the terai.

One of the reasons why Nepal’s non-agricultural sector failed to record any significant growth is its land-locked position which is made much worse by the sadistic attitude of our southern neighbor, India.

Nepal has singularly failed to attract any foreign capital primarily because of its handicapped situation to compete in the overseas market and extremely circumscribed access to Indian markets. Until very recently, India doggedly discriminated against Nepal by laying stringent conditions for Nepal’s export to India in terms of the fact that they had to have a very high Nepali or Indian raw material content. But India never asked such questions for her imports from other countries and also never had to answer them in regard to her own exports to Nepal.

This problem has been further compounded by the harassments that the Nepali exporters regularly face at the hands of the Indian officials while transiting their exports through the Indian Territory.

The situation was further enormously aggravated by the embargo clamped down by India in 1988 against land-locked Nepal which would go into the annals of world history as the only peace time unilateral embargo imposed by a country against her land locked neighbour. This embargo, among others, mercilessly exposed the inherent vulnerability of Nepal as a destination for international capital investments. It is probably because of this very specific handicap that almost none of the over one hundred so-called joint venture agreements signed between potential foreign investors and Nepali entrepreneurs during the UNDP-sponsored international investment Mela organized in Kathmandu a few years ago materialized.

Unless India’s neighbour-strangulating policies undergo fundamental transformations, Nepal is bound to remain an essentially rural country with a predominantly agricultural population. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, the one and only way for ensuring any possible well-being of the vast majority of the Nepali populace is to achieve effective rural development which must mean nothing more, or nothing less, than effective alleviation of rural poverty.

But as it is, all the intelligent minds in the government are engaged in listening to the sermons of the pundits of the international donor world for devising and continuing policies for the so-called economic liberalization and the possible growth of the industrial sector which, for reasons cited above, has remained miniscule, employed only one-sixteenth of the manpower engaged in agriculture, and historically thrived on protection, trade deflections and other malpractices such as ganging up in cartels.

On the other hand, rural development remained a neglected sector and drew the attention of the politicians merely as a place to implement their vote getting ploys.

The Eighth Plan document itself has made important provisions on local development. It said that targeted individual and group-based programs for the poor people consisting of production credit, training, employment, children’s education, etc. would be implemented and that since NGOs have the advantage in implementing such programs, community and non- government organizations will be encouraged to implement them. (NPC, 1991:558-9). The Plan also provided that the role of the government would be redefined and would be limited to facilitation, supervision and monitoring of the local development process. All sectoral agencies in the districts and municipalities including their budgets were to be handed over to the respective local bodies within two years of plan implementation. User groups and local cooperatives would be encouraged and would be made free of political influence and control. (NPC, 1991: 634-640).

But in terms of the implementation value of these provisions, they have not been worth even the cost of the paper on which they have been printed. This callousness and apparent irresponsibility on the part of the so- called democratic government and its planning machinery are hard to understand. Our geographical position and our relations with our southern neighbour dictate in no uncertain terms that rural development must be seen as the sector of national salvation for many years to come and therefore, be accorded the highest possible priority in our national scheme of things.

The National Integrational Imperative of Rural Development Building a Nation from the Grassroots. 

After the political liberalization of 1990, the country’s immense ethnic heterogeneity and the relative socio-economic deprivation of different groups in the society are beginning to express themselves with increasing vehemence and important implications for national integration both at political and emotional levels. Almost every ethnic or caste group in the society harbours a sense of comparative disadvantage and of oppression and exploitation at the hands of the members of other groups which happen to be socially, economically and politically more fortunate than themselves. In many cases, such feelings are being fanned by none other than the more fortunate members of their own groups who, by so doing, can hope to establish an important political bridgehead for themselves in their ethnic fraternities.

Much of those grievances can also be factually established. There now exists a sufficient body of information to show that poverty is more acute and widespread among such caste/ethnic groups like Sarki, Chepang or Tamang than among others such as Chhetri, Bahun or Newars. While one can argue that the latter too are not entirely devoid of their own share of destitute population, their proportion is relatively and visibly limited. And since social and economic status has traditionally been the basis for the acquisition of political power, the members of these very ethnic groups also enjoy a dominant position both politically and administratively in the country. All these together make them the logical subject of envy at the hands of the critics from other ethnic groups, and therefore, an appropriate basis for fomenting inter-ethnic intolerance.

However, the issue at stake is not one of a few ethnic groups engaged in full-scale exploitation of other ethnic groups but of unequal distribution of opportunities and resources between individuals across different ethnic groups. There are rich Tamangs as there are poor Bahuns and so on. The urban dwellers are generally richer than their rural counterparts. Therefore, the issue that has to be addressed on a priority basis is equality of access to opportunities for all individuals in the society which should eventually dispel the notion that a few select ethnic groups or sections of population are being unduly privileged at the expense of others in the society. Inculcating this feeling in all citizens is indispensable for ensuring what has often been termed as “unity in diversity” in a multi-ethnic society like Nepal. Nepal’s nation building and national integration efforts, therefore, must have their roots among the poor in the villages. Only an effective process of rural development and rural poverty alleviation can engender such a feeling among the vast multitude of the poor in Nepal, and in the process, frustrate the designs of those conspiring to foment inter-ethnic hatred in the society.

A united and participatory society is also an essential precondition for successfully dealing with foreign nations. Nepal can never become a super power in terms of military and economic might, but she can still become a respectable member of the world community, provided her citizens are treated properly, enjoy a decent life and share a sense of common destiny. No Nepali can become a proud minister, ambassador, or diplomat as long as he has to represent a country that is poor and decadent. And none of them can be properly effective in their dealings abroad unless they have their nation solidly behind them. Rural development, thus, constitutes the fundamental basis for Nepal’s national existence and prosperity as well as for her relations abroad.

A Brief Historical Perspective of Rural Development Strategies in Nepal: 

Nepal’s history of rural development begins in 1953 when the American government rendered assistance for what was then called Tribhuvan Village Development Program. By all accounts it was a naive intervention; a small team of low level and poorly trained technicians and with modest financial resources were placed in the then very large districts hoping that “rural development” would take place. Poorly trained and poorly supervised Village Development Workers were placed in the village who mostly worked for the local Zamindars.

The then Indian Aid Mission to Nepal joined in soon after, in 1955, and brought a large team of their own technicians as “advisors” who basically ran the program for the Nepalese. The assistance program was terminated in 1962 after the dissolution of the 2-year old Nepali Congress government and the introduction of the partyless Panchayat System in the country.

Major evolution in the institutional framework for rural development occurred during 1960s, lOs and 80s which continued to enjoy the support of the Americans and quickly moved to create a nationwide network of Village and District Panchayat and placed district-level development officials under the latter’s purview. In 1965, a major, although eventually abortive, effort was made to conceive and implement an ambitious scheme in the field of decentralization, which the then Constitution laid down as ne of the tenets of the partyless political system. When the line ministries increased their manpower capabilities and tended to gravitate away from the control of the local bodies, a District Administration Plan, aimed at coordinating the activities of the local bodies and the line agencies, was introduced in 1974. In 1978, an Integrated Panchayat Development Design was introduced aimed at strengthening the local bodies as the focal point of planning and implementation of local development programs and at creating multi-purpose service centres at the sub-district level.

In 1980 a separate Ministry of Local Development was established and an office of the Local Development Officer — with a Class II Executive Secretary of the District Panchayat — installed. The procedures of integrated planning at the district level was emphasized and the concept of Service Centres at the sub-district level was reinforced. The concept of User Groups, from the findings of an ethnographic study of Junila (Shrestha, 1971), was adopted and made the main institutional basis for planning and implementation of projects at the grassroots (Local Development Ministry, 1980).

With increasing difficulty in devolving authority to the local bodies, the Panchayat government legislated a Decentralization Act, 1982 which mandatorily made the district line agencies integral Sections of the District Panchayat Secretariat, made the provision of resource forecasts by the Ministries to the District Panchayats a mandatory requirement, required the preparation of District Profiles and formulation of multi-sectoral annual District Development Plans and made the user groups a legally binding institutional basis for the local development activities across all sectors (Law Books Management Committee, 1984).

Whatever the political nature of the Panchayat regime, there certainly was an on-going search for more effective institutional methods for rural development. His Majesty King Birendra’s call in 1985 for the Fulfillment of Basic Needs of the People by Year 2000 was a step in similar direction. The outstanding performance of the district of Palpa in community forestry, or in short, “the greening of Palpa” where all its 65 VDCs have their own user-managed forest/s has basically been the outcome of the Panchayat decentralization efforts having embraced the traditional institutional mechanism of user groups as part of the decentralization policy. Experts believe that there are now more trees growing in the hills of Nepal than those being felled, and it results primarily from the adoption of the user group approach in the community forestry program of the country. It is also a matter of pride for Nepal that it enjoys the foremost place in the world in the field of community-based management of forestry.

Current State of Rural Development Strategy in Nepal:

The aforesaid achievements notwithstanding, Nepal’s steadily evolving decentralization strategy was dealt a fatal blow by the post-1990 Koirala government when they rewrote the local bodies’s Acts in 1991 in a way that allowed all the line agencies in the districts to declare independence from the district bodies; the system of providing resource forecasts by the Ministries was discontinued; and the practice of undertaking joint planning of sectoral programs within the framework of a District Development Plan (DDP) abruptly came to an end; and the unilateral top-down planning by individual sectors was reinstated. The sanctity of the concept of User Groups was violated with impunity; the User Committees in the villages were blatantly used as a means of awarding power and mundane opportunities to the so-called workers of the political parties even when they do not happen to be among the direct beneficiaries of a project.

The District Assembly, later renamed District Council (DC), which was basically the district parliament, generally met on time to approve the DDP and to enable the line agencies to submit their plans to their own Ministries for the sectoral plan of the following year. However, with the independence of the line agencies, it has since lost all its rationale as a forum for the formulation of district development plans. The situation suffered a further setback with the initiation of the tradition of giving 5 hundred thousand rupees directly to the VDCs. The VDC representatives in the DC are no longer attracted by the tiny sums of money that the DDC still handle and allocate, and as a result, the DC has degenerated into being no more than a speech-making forum to foster partisan politics in the districts. It is quite ironic to note that while the current Congress leadership continues to act as if they invented decentralization in Nepal, the party’s own district leaders, e.g. the DDC President of Syangja, demand that they need nothing more than the restoration of the Panchayat-day Decentralization Act of 1982.

As it is, the government’s rural development strategy is in a state of total disarray. The practice, initiated during CPM-UML’s brief stint in the government, of giving a direct grant of 5 hundred rupees to each VDC in the country has been retained by the present government for fear of backlash at the ballots. But nobody is monitoring the fact that in some VDCs the sum is grossly misused, in some it remains unused and in still others, it is quite well-used. The grant scheme itself is based on the fallacy that lack of financial resources has been the causal factor in the continued underdevelopment of the rural people. Some 2 billion rupees in scarce national resources are spent this way annually, and nobody is seriously monitoring it.

One of the positive contributions of the current multi-party constitution of the country has been that it has removed the Panchayat day fetters on NGOs.

NGOs can now be easily organized and they have since dramatically grown in number. They now include several which run very effective rural development programs in several districts of the country, many of them with donor support but certainly not exclusively so. But the government’s own policy towards them has unfortunately remained ambivalent, if not negative. Many government agencies still cannot stand the NGOs when the latter outshine the performance of the former in the field.

There also continue to exist a number of donor-funded rural development projects in the country, each one of them toeing their own approaches. And the government has singularly failed to design and impress the donors with a rural development policy of its own. As a result, none of them take the Eighth Plan provisions on rural development seriously.

Text courtesy: Social economy and national development, A NEFAS publication 1996: Thanks the distinguished author: Ed. Upadhyaya.

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