By Devendra Gautam
As another festive season looms amid an all-pervasive pessimism due mainly to an inept clique bent on silencing dissent through a crackdown on social media on one pretext or the other, there’s precious little to celebrate.
Like in the past, the Ministry of Industries, Commerce and Supplies has decided to sell edibles at subsidized rates through thinly spread outlets of the Salt Trading Corporation (STC) and Food Management and Trading Company (FMTC) in a ritualistic fashion, perhaps to give an impression that a heavily taxed people are, in fact, surviving on subsidised food.
Per this decision, the outlets under the FMTC will give Rs 5/kg off on each kilogram of rice, pulses, wheat, sugar and beans along with Rs 7 off on each kg of beaten rice, flour and processed flour, and every litre of edible oil.
Indigenous products from Karnali will cost a bit less during the season, due to a waiver of Rs 10/kg on Jumli Marsi rice, foxtail millet, beans, proso millet, buckwheat and naked barley. What’s more, the same discount will apply to cumin seeds, tea, coriander and live goats as well as sheep. The FMTC will operate outlets in 46 districts to make the foodstuffs available at subsidized rates whereas the STC will do the same through 15 shops, in Kathmandu and beyond. The STC will provide a discount of Rs 2/kg on table salt, Rs 5/kg on sugar, Rs 7/kg on beaten rice, pulses, flour and processed flour as well as edible oils (per liter).
The government decision gives one and all an impression that food inflation is a seasonal phenomenon in this land naturally suitable for all sorts of crops, that food adulteration and black marketing occur only during the festivities and that the domestic market is on auto pilot at all other times.
Yours truly has no idea what kind of matibhram–a foggy mind phenomenon, self-induced or otherwise–envelopes our politicians and government employees once they reach higher echelons, making them forget that food insecurity has been a constant in Nepal for decades.
In the 2024 Global Hunger Index, for example, the country ranked 68th out of the 127 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2024 GHI scores. With a score of 14.7, Nepal has a level of hunger that is moderate, which is no badge of honor for an agrarian economy.
These people remind this scribe of a ruler, who, when visiting a famine-hit far-western region of the country during the Panchayat era, wanted to know from his hangers-on: Can these people not even afford rice and milk?
Our leaders were once socialists, communists, democrats, revolutionaries, so on and so forth, right? They were the proverbial knights in shining armor, tasking themselves with the onerous responsibility of rescuing the country from evil rulers. How can they forget about a hungry humanity that they have been steering from one futile revolution to another for ages, just like that?
During their struggles for their cherished systems, there was a time when our politicos did not have decent clothes to wear on and even a square meal a day used to be a luxury.
Apparently, these real characters of real rags to riches stories have forgotten those days of hardships.
Most of our bureaucrats are also from agricultural families, aren’t they? Does the plight of the laity not prick their conscience? If it does, do they think that seasonal subsidies will ameliorate their plight?
No? What is the remedy, then?
There’s no dearth of crème de la crème agriculturists, who can offer great suggestions at great rates, from within the country and/or beyond.
Till such great people enter the scene and offer their nuggets of wisdom, how about conducting regular, no-nonsense market monitoring, taking stringent action against black marketeers and food adulterers, imposing tougher restrictions on development of real estate on fertile farmlands, promoting indigenous crops throughout the country (not only during the festivities, of course), encouraging working age population to toil it out in their farmlands instead of leaving the country for dirty, difficult, dangerous (3D) jobs, making sure that middlemen do not end up fleecing both food growers and consumers, and curbing imports?
And how about leaving modern farms—social media platforms—for a while, unless you are making a fortune out of it? How about pressing these platforms to abide by the law of the land, if they are not already? While they earn big within our national jurisdictions, they have tax obligations too, don’t they?
In the end, let’s hope that the foggy mindset—which may get worse with a virtual ban on all manners of criticism following restrictions on social media and singing of paeans through subdued and subjugated media, state-run or otherwise—goes and diamond-hard craniums devoid of light for decades illuminate, ushering this country into a great dawn.
After all, hope is our best bet, isn’t it?
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