By Our Reporter
Preparations for the Nepal Investment Summit 2019 scheduled for March 29-30 in Kathmandu have almost completed.
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, while addressing a meeting of Nepal Communist Party‘s Parliamentary Party at Federal Parliament Building at New Baneshwor on Sunday, also informed that the preparations were made to hold the summit on Friday and Saturday.
He expressed his hope that the investment summit would be concluded in an enthusiastic manner and foreign investment would be brought in as per the government’s expectation.
The government is hosting the two-day event, third in the row, with an aim of bringing in foreign investment in big projects and thus creating a base for making the country prosperous as promised by it.
It is almost sure that over 600 investors from 40 countries are attending the summit, and the government will try its best to convince them to invest. The government is planning to present a list of 66 projects ranging from Rs 640 million to Rs 350 billion for investment during the summit.
Energy, physical infrastructure, agriculture, information technology, industry, health and education and tourism are the areas of special focus for investment. Eight big projects have been selected by giving special priority to energy sector.
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is scheduled to inaugurate the summit while ministers and industrialists will brief about Nepal’s recent situation and investment environment.
The government has argued that the Summit would succeed to achieve the target as a stable government is in place and laws have been already amended to create a suitable environment for foreign investment.
However, experts and former finance ministers have suspected the success of the summit due to non-performance of the government and its moves to curtail freedom of expression in the country. Moreover, the failure of the government in providing security to the projects might discourage the investors from coming into Nepal. The bomb blast in the Arun III project is a testimony to this.
According to them, the investors cannot easily believe the communists as the present powerful government is of the communists even though the communists were elected through a fair poll held last year. The low participation of the investors from the US and the EU countries in the Summit also supports this argument.
The Federal Parliament has passed the Public-Private Partnership and Investment Bill with an objective of creating easy and smooth environment to foreign investors. Similarly, it passed Bill to amend and integrate laws related to foreign investment and technology transfer, Bill designed to amend Special Economic Zone Act-2073.
But these laws would not be enough to lure foreign investment unless the investors were guaranteed security and return, which are lacking at the moment, according to experts.
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