By Devendra Gautam
Amid charges of a massive embezzlement scam in the Ram Temple, Ayodhya and other developments, India—the sixth largest economy with a nominal GDP of around $4.15 trillion coupled with the fourth most powerful military—needs a very, very vigorous reading.
Issues ranging from Kalapani-Lipulek-Limpiadhura to Susta, Kanchanpur, and Pashupatinagar, to people-to-people relations, to the very tea leaves of Ilam, Jhapa, and other districts make our next-door neighbor a supercomplex reading. But impossible is nothing, right?
For sure, such an undertaking requires the best minds. And where can one get such minds if not in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who, together with the generals of Bhadrakali Palace, know geopolitics and geostrategy spectacularly well? This small-time writer should not be asking big questions for want of expertise. Rather, he should get reading, seriously. Of course, he can be no match for the best minds of the ministry and other brilliant minds that feature regularly in reputed government publications, but he can give serious reading a serious try, even if books cost a small fortune.
By the way, the government move of not doling out advertisements to private publications is a diamond of an idea. Whoever suggested it deserves a Nepal Ratna, the highest civilian honour from the government of Nepal.
Why on earth….
Because studies have proved that those who feature regularly in those glittering pages of government publications have more grey matter than others. Haven’t they, o superbrains presiding over those annals that have been shining on the global news-views firmament like the North Star?
So, why waste precious resources on disposable papers at the expense of such great publications that have earned a global reputation?
One more suggestion to the government, all for free: During the Panchayat era, pages of those annals used to feature Sripanchko Mahavani (great quotes from his majesty the king) like: “Hami sabai mili deshma vikasko muul futaunu pareko chha” (We all should join hands to have development gushing through its fountain). As such inspiring quotes meant for the laity can have development gushing in the country like monsoon rain-fed rivers, government annals should feature fresh gems from their majesties of the republican polity, whenever they come.
Back to the supercomplex reading.
In Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future, Raghuram G. Rajan and Rohit Lamba highlight some of India’s notable leaps: a faster rate of construction of infrastructure like highways, tunnels, and rural roads; direct benefit transfers enabled by the digital stack; the mass opening of bank accounts that allow the government to reach beneficiaries directly with minimal leakage on the way; and a well-organized meeting of the G20 in Delhi, which culminated in a statement that achieved consensus on some very fractious issues.
In the same breath, the writers note that the move to develop smart cities, the production-linked incentives to increase manufacturing in India, the reforms to agricultural markets, and the dramatic demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes in November 2016 have ranged from the ineffectual to the truly damaging.
Notably, the demonetization affected lakhs of Nepalis working in India, turning their hard-earned savings into mere pieces of paper, disrupting cross-border trade, and incurring on Nepal a significant loss with India’s refusal to accept more than Indian currency worth 7 crore kept in the vaults of the Nepal Rastra Bank. That there’s no accountability for this shock and loss is one more proof of the special, warm and people-to-people relations persisting between our two countries for ages, isn’t it?
In keeping with the aspirations of a rising India, the writers argue further that a country that accounts for one-sixth of humanity should aspire for one-sixth of Nobel laureates, patents, multinational CEOs, and Olympic medalists. Writing 75 years after Independence, the writers believe that India’s best days are still ahead, appealing to all Indians: We have work to do. Let us get to it!
There’s a feeling, especially among some of our “enlightened minds,” that the rise of India—and China—will automatically bring peace, progress and prosperity to our doorsteps. Our wonks conveniently forget the fundamentals: In terms of land area, India is 22 times bigger than Nepal, whereas China is 65 times bigger. Home to 1.47 billion people, India is the most populous country, followed by China at 1.41 billion—and we come nowhere near.
These brains conveniently forget that Nepal has not moved much northward despite the two neighbours’ Himalayan-scale achievements over the past 75 years in terms of infrastructure development, poverty alleviation and economic growth.
These data points suggest one very important thing: Our domestic development imperatives differ fundamentally from the development needs of the superpowers in the making, the presiding superpower and other powers worth their names. The use of our scarce resources for their development—such as rivers and streams for export-oriented power projects, and cross-border road and rail networks for bringing the two most populous countries closer—comes at huge costs, environmental or otherwise.
Construction of infrastructure for the cross-border harnessing of rivers like the Koshi, Gandaki and Mahakali over 75 years has shown how we have ended up footing a huge bill while catering to the massive irrigation, flood control, farming and energy needs of a giant neighbor. Parched fields from the Koshi to Gandaki to Mahakali to Rapti, the Himalayas bereft of snow turning into mere rocky formations, permanently inundated swathes, a debilitating loss of water sovereignty and a rapidly denuding Chure form a part of the nightmare we have been living. We are footing a massive cost for unequal deals, climate change, and global warming—all in all, raw deals galore—despite a nominal carbon footprint. Add to it a high vulnerability to “natural disasters” like floods, landslides, and wildfires.
The mandarins of the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Finance, and other famous addresses don’t live in a different intersection of time and space, do they? If they don’t, why can’t they see that our development needs contradict the development needs of the north, the south and the West?
Amid a development frenzy that involves the construction of infrastructure like cross-border road and railway links and export-oriented power projects for regional and global integration, the time has come for our government to put conservation in the driving seat as it hurtles down a development path without giving much thought to the actual needs and export potential of a mid-sized country of barely 30 million people.
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