Development dilemmas

Development – or bikas, in Nepali – has been the country’s political mantra ever since the Ranas were booted out of office in 1950. And yet Nepal remains one of the world’s poorest nations, with a per capita income of just over $1000 a year. In truth, this figure is distorted by migrant labourers’ remittances, and perhaps half of Nepal’s population survives on little more than a dollar a day. On the UN’s 2014 Human Development Index, Nepal ranked 145th out of 187 countries – sandwiched ingloriously between Nigeria and Haiti.

Everything seems stacked against Nepal. It is landlocked, and squeezed between two economic giants. It has few natural resources. The steep terrain makes farming inefficient and communications difficult. Earthquakes and monsoons can undo dams, roads and other infrastructure as fast as they’re built. A combination of Hindu fatalism, the caste system and a legacy of aristocratic paternalism has long kept the doors of opportunity tightly shut – the regime did essentially nothing for its people before 1951. Since then, governments have apparently prioritized corruption and clientism over development – despite the incredible efforts of aid workers and local activists.

THE DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY

Everyone loves to give aid to Nepal. The country receives hundreds of millions of dollars annually in direct grants and concessionary loans, making it one of the world’s leading aid recipients on a per capita basis. Depending on the year, foreign aid accounts for anything up to eighty percent of the money spent by Nepal’s government on projects (capital expenditure), and around a quarter of total expenditure; the joke goes that the country can’t afford to develop.

Aid comes in many forms. Bilateral (and multilateral) aid – money directly given or lent by foreign governments, invariably with political or commercial strings attached – has financed most of the roads, dams and airports in the country. Social programmes tend to be carried out by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which can be anything from giants such as Oxfam, CARE and Save the Children to a couple of highly motivated people doing fieldwork and raising sponsorship money at home. Voluntary NGOs, such as Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and the US Peace Corps, generally slot volunteers into existing government programmes. Increasingly important are revenues from international lending bodies such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB), which both provide direct grants and act as brokers to arrange loans for big projects with commercial potential – usually irrigation and hydroelectric schemes. The ADB, for instance, is now the source of over twenty percent of Nepal’s foreign aid.

Many of these organizations do excellent work. But paying imported experts ten or twenty times more than Nepalis to do the same job causes resentment and distorts the local economy. Large organizations are effectively obliged to fund large-scale projects, which may not always be the most appropriate or efficient options. And many projects are crippled by short-term funding that prevents them taking a long-term view. Foreign aid can also foster a crippling aid dependency. ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs=

The fashionable philosophy, therefore, is to finance local NGOs, which supposedly have a better handle on local problems and solutions. The result has been an explosion in Nepali organizations, blurring the distinction between genuine, grass-roots organizations run by the heroically dedicated, and quasi-companies tailoring themselves to fit the latest development buzz words: sustainable, small-scale, women-focused, environmental – whatever. Lack of coordination results in monumental inefficiency, and lack of scrutiny means that some aren’t doing much besides writing grant proposals.

Nepal’s population was officially 27.7 million at the time of writing, but is almost certainly two or three million more. The rate of growth may be slowing down (it currently stands at some 1.2 percent per year, down from 2.25 percent ten years ago), but the population continues to increase. Each year there are some 400,000 more Nepalis to feed and employ – and, indeed, requiring health care, education, clean water, sewage disposal, electricity and roads. Population growth will continue as long as women remain comparatively ill educated and low status, and as long as children are needed to fetch water, gather fuel and tend animals – and to care for the aged parents in the absence of pensions or state support. Moreover, Nepalis tend to have large families because they can’t be sure all their children will survive. Hindus, especially, may keep trying until they’ve produced at least one son, who alone can perform the prescribed rites (shradha) for his parents after their death.

It’s often said that “development is the best contraceptive”, and indeed, there is a close correlation between rising standards of living and declining birth rates. Unfortunately, in most countries this so-called demographic transition involves a period of rapid population growth until the birth rate settles down to match the lower death rate. The slowing in Nepal’s growth rate is probably partly a result of improved women’s education – and anxiety in the face of insecurity and inflation.

And the growth is just about balanced, for the time, by outward migration. The hill peoples, especially men, have long sought work in Kathmandu, the Terai and India. Nowadays, young Nepali men are as likely to emigrate to the Gulf and Southeast Asia or East Asia, or indeed the West. Some two million Nepalis currently work abroad, which is twice the number ten years ago, and for the first time in living memory, some middle hill districts are becoming depopulated. Instead of new terraces being painfully carved out by hand, old fields are lying fallow. At the same time, the country’s urban population is exploding. The population of the Kathmandu Valley more than doubled between the early 1990s and late 2000s, and is set to continue rising at an unsustainable rate.

Health

The average life expectancy is now 67, up from 43 in 1975 – though the poor can still expect to live some fifteen years less than the average, and the average Nepali will live in poor health from his or her mid-50s onwards. The figure is heavily influenced by the distressingly high rate of child mortality: almost one out of every twenty children in Nepal dies before he or she reaches the age of five.

Still, this is a vast improvement over 1960, when the figure was almost one in three; and maternal mortality rates have virtually halved in the last twenty years alone. Cheap oral rehydration packets are largely responsible for saving these lives, as the chief cause of infant death is nothing more complicated than diarrhoea, itself the consequence of poor sanitation. Access to safe (or at least “improved”) water has widened significantly in recent years: almost ninety percent of Nepalis now have access to a spring, well or communal tap.

Surviving infancy is only the start. Around half of Nepali children are malnourished and suffer from unceasing hunger and a relentless series of infections – of which the permanently snotty nose of the rural child is just one outward sign. Parasitic infections are also rife. Almost half the population is thought to carry tuberculosis, and some forty thousand ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= Nepalis develop TB actively every year, leading to more than five thousand deaths. There are successes: leprosy is becoming more rare, though Nepal still has one of the highest per capita rates in the world, and mosquito spraying in the Terai has reduced malaria cases to about five thousand annually – compared with two million a year during the 1950s.

Nepal avoided the HIV-AIDS epidemic for many years, but sex workers, long-distance truck drivers and seasonal migrants provided a channel for transmission of the disease from India – one recent study found that two-thirds of women trafficked into India for sex work acquired HIV. The infection is common among the country’s thirty

thousand-odd injecting drug users and twenty to thirty thousand sex workers, and starting to spread into the general population as well: roughly seventy thousand Nepalis are currently living with HIV-AIDS.

There are no statistics on alcoholism, but it is certainly one of the major public health problems among men from the hill ethnic groups. Since the late 1990s, Maoist-affiliated women’s community groups have aggressively tackled drinking, and in government the Maoists have introduced ever-more stringent regulation, but drinking culture is fairly embedded. Tobacco use seems if anything even more entrenched: more than half of adult Nepalis smoke.

In addition to all these problems, access to health care is extremely poor. Many parochial hospitals lack even a single resident doctor, since the vast majority of qualified physicians prefer to practise privately in the Kathmandu Valley. For rural Nepalis, medical assistance means a local jhankri (see p.405) or health post that’s a day or more’s walk (or piggyback ride) down the trail and where the only person on staff may effectively be the janitor, or perhaps an assistant with some ayurvedic training.

Agriculture

More than two-thirds of Nepalis still make their living from agriculture, on some of the most intensively cultivated land in the world. For some experts, this means that farming should be the focus of development – especially given the population growth. Nepal has been a net importer of rice since the 1970s, and localized food deficits are a serious problem, especially in the remote northwestern districts of Humla and Mugu, where famines and emergency food airlifts are a regular spring occurrence.

Clearing new land for cultivation only adds to deforestation (see below), so productivity has been chased instead. High-yielding seeds and animal breeds such as the Jersey cross – fondly known as bikasi gai, or “development cow” – have had some success, while pesticides and chemical fertilizers are now widely used in the Kathmandu Valley and Terai. In the hills, however, it can be impossible or uneconomic to transport these inputs. Where fertilizers are used, they’re often misapplied. Irrigation is a promising area, but the big canal systems underwritten by the government and foreign funders are often inefficient and poorly maintained, and tend to benefit only the bigger landholdings. Tractors and other mechanized equipment, similarly, are only really workable on bigger farms in the plains.

Thanks to subdivision across generations, many farms have simply become too small to feed a family – which is why so many Nepalis are now undernourished. Many small farmers are locked in a hopeless cycle of debt, or have been forced to sell or hand over their land to unscrupulous moneylenders. Supplying credit through the official Agriculture Development Bank has grown impossibly bureaucratic, but microcredit loan programmes look more promising. Allowing farmers to grow cash crops is another possible solution, but roads are needed to export, and the development of the road network may actually make it impossible to compete with Indian imports.

In the circumstances, many younger and more educated Nepalis are abandoning the land and seeking paid employment. Areas under Maoist control during the ten-year conflict saw large areas of land seized and redistributed, sometimes turned over to farms working on a “cooperative” model. In government, the Maoists have come under ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= pressure to return much of it, and whether or not their promises of country-wide, “scientific” land reform will bear fruit is uncertain. Even the lowering of existing ceilings on individual land ownership is in question.

Deforestation

deforestation, which itself causes erosion and landslides, thus reducing productivity and contributing to flooding. In practice, there are counterbalancing forces: the further people have to walk to find firewood or fodder, the more likely they are to emigrate, taking pressure off the area’s resources.

No one has a clear idea of the rate of forest loss in Nepal but certainly the government got it badly wrong when it nationalized the forests in the 1950s. From the 1980s, however, the policy of sustainable, locally managed community forestry slowed or even reversed deforestation in some hill areas. The breakdown in law and order during the conflict, however, and the massively increased road network, meant that the community forests were corruptly or illegally plundered on a dramatic scale from the late 1990s onwards. The Terai suffered worst: trees have been clear-felled right across the south, leading to the loss of some 2640 square kilometres of forest in the five years up to 2005 alone. Overall, a quarter of Nepal’s forest has vanished in the last twenty years, including almost all of the magnificent native forest outside the national parks and wildlife or forest reserves. Perhaps a quarter of Nepal’s total land cover is woodland today, and less than half of that is true, “primary” forest.

Efforts to reduce deforestation produced one apparently brilliant solution: the “smokeless” chulo (stove), which burns wood more efficiently. The positive side effect, however – reducing levels of health-destroying kitchen smoke – turned out to be problematic: insects were no longer smoked out of traditional thatched roofs, leading to infestations and increased use of corrugated metal. The miracle stoves also emit less light, causing increased dependency on kerosene for lamps or electricity – both of which require hard cash to purchase.

Waste and pollution

An astounding number of foreign news stories relating to Nepal focus on pollution – usually of the “Everest is a rubbish dump” sort. There’s a bit of truth to these reports. The most popular “yak route” up Everest is indeed bestrewn with the remnants of old expeditions, and expeditions regularly find funding by offering “clean-up Everest” missions – one removed 8000kg of rubbish from Everest Base Camp. There’s a lot of Himalaya beyond Everest, however. Even the environmental pressure on trekking routes is restricted to a few ribbons of the country – admittedly, in relatively fragile mountain areas.

Waste disposal is a major national problem, of course. Consumption of manufactured goods has boomed, yet there are few organized methods of waste disposal outside the major cities (and precious few within them). The less visible pollution issues are arguably more serious, however. Air pollution in the cities is life-threatening, due to a lethal combination of brick manufacture in kilns, burning of fuel woods and rubbish (including plastics), and ever-swelling volumes of traffic. Vehicular pollution is exacerbated by the routine adulteration of fuels (low-taxed, subsidized kerosene is illegally added to petrol and diesel), and the dust clouds caused by unsealed road surfaces. After an hour on Kathmandu’s Ring Road, you can feel the grit between your teeth and the black snot in your nose.

LITTER

Western visitors are frequently horrifed by the amount of visible rubbishipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= in Nepal, but often forget to ask themselves how they would manage their own waste if no one ever came to take away their bins. Tourists also consume items that are particularly hard to get rid of (bottles, toilet paper, batteries and plastic, for instance), and with a much greater intensity than locals. The traditional, local methods of waste disposal – composting in the fields and burning – just can’t keep up. Next time you’re horrified by the sight of a child dropping a sweet wrapper, consider that the average carbon emission of a Nepalese person is 1 tonne per capita: about a tenth of most Europeans, and a twentieth of the average North American. Next time you buy a bottle of mineral water, consider that, at best, it’s going to be burned in someone’s courtyard.

Human waste also presents a major challenge. Defecation in the open pollutes water sources and assists in the transmission of many diseases, as flies may alight on human waste and then food. Many development programmes have focused on the building of toilets in recent years, from the “one family one toilet” scheme, to Eco Himal’s “public toilets for Everest” campaign and Kaski District’s proud declaration of itself as “Nepal’s first open-defecation-free zone”. Yet sewer systems are still poor where they exist at all (and they certainly struggle to cope with the toilet paper used by tourists – paper should be put in separate bins for burning later). Composting toilets and pit latrines are becoming ever more sophisticated, however, and more common.

Water pollution is easy to see, but a relatively little-known environmental threat is the extraction of sand, gravel and stone from rivers, fuelled by the construction boom. Drive along any riverside road in Nepal, and you’ll see the trucks and the diggers. As many as one hundred lorry-loads of sand can be legally removed per day from a river site, but real volumes may be three times higher, and there are scores of illegal sites. The result is disturbance or destruction of wildlife habitat, the exacerbation of landslides and the acceleration of erosion. In the Churia Hills of the Terai, meanwhile, hundreds of illegal crusher industries operate, quarrying rock and exporting it as sand and stone to India.

Electricity

Nepal’s steep, mountain-fed rivers have enormous hydroelectric potential – enough to power the British Isles, by some estimates. Unfortunately, getting materials and technical experts into the rugged backcountry, not to mention handling the Himalayan-scale seismic problems, has made this potential difficult to harness. Currently, only five percent of rural Nepalis have access to electricity – at night the hills still remain largely swathed in darkness. And access is no miracle solution: electricity itself costs rupees, and electric appliances cost dollars. Electrification can actually add to the pressure on forests, too, because good lighting encourages people to stay up late, burning more wood to keep warm.

Small-scale successes have been achieved with microhydro projects, which supply electricity for a few hundred households each. Locally manufactured solar waterheaters are also promising, as are biogas plants, tank-like super-composters of manure and agricultural waste which collect the gas given off for burning. But to satisfy demand growing at ten percent a year, and currently estimated at 850MW (megawatts) at peak, Nepal has to persuade international donors and lending bodies to finance

hydroelectric projects.

The idea of building huge-scale storage dams fell out of favour in 1995, after the World Bank finally withdrew from the monstrous (404MW) Arun III project, citing environmental and social concerns. The emphasis now is on licensing of private sector companies to build mostly small- to medium-sized “run-of-river” diversions. Many such projects were mothballed during the Maoist conflict, but political stability and an

LOADSHEDDING

Despite its goal of exporting clean hydropower to India, Nepal cannot begin to keep up with domestic demand and is forced to import dirty power from its southern neighbour – a fact ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= which became painfully clear after the Koshi flood of 2008, which washed out a crucial transmission line. Domestic electricity supply is also threatened by seasonal fluctations: only one of Nepal’s hydro projects, the 92MW Kulekhani, has a reservoir, and the power output of the other schemes drops along with river levels over the course of the winter. From as early as October onwards, the country now operates policies of load-shedding (scheduled power cuts), which means all power is lost for anything up to eighteen hours a day. During the blackouts, industry and government is crippled and foreign investment and tourism stifled; only criminals profit – plus, of course, amateur stargazers who want to really see the night sky.

improved climate for foreign investment may lead to an explosion: plans exist for two dozen hydropower projects, capable of producing over 1000MW, and construction is starting on some of them.

In recent years, two 70MW projects on the Marsyangdi, on the east side of the Annapurna range, and the 144MW Kali Gandaki ”A” project, on the west, have started production. Work has started on others – notably on the Upper Trisuli – and it is still possible that some huge dams may go ahead. In August 2011, plans for the huge (and hugely controversial) 750MW West Seti dam project, in Nepal’s Far West region, were shelved after the Asian Development Bank finally admitted that the scheme met none of its own criteria for information disclosure, public participation, environmental assessment or proper acknowledgement of the rights of local people. Then, in November, the Chinese agreed to provide a $1.6 billion loan for the project – and it looked as if it was back on. At the time of writing, the project had a prospective completion date of 2019.

Roads and paths

Until the 1950s, the only way to get to Nepal was to walk. In fact, the only way to get anywhere within Nepal was to walk. VIPs might be carried in palanquins, the royal elite could drive up and down a few kilometres of road in cars dismantled and imported piecemeal from India, and valuable freight was swung over from the plains on a 42km ropeway (which operated from the 1920s to the early 1990s) – but otherwise, you had to walk.

Nepal began to open in the 1950s. Cows in a field outside Kathmandu were surprised when the first plane landed, in 1953. Three years later, the tortuous Tribhuwan Rajpath was completed, connecting Nepal’s capital to India. In the 1960s, the Chinese managed to blast the Arniko Highway down from the Tibetan border (the bridges, it was said, were exactly strong enough to carry a Chinese tank), and they funded the Prithvi Highway, which joined Kathmandu with Pokhara. India chipped in with a link from Pokhara to its own border, at Sonauli, and by the end of the 1960s, a faster route from Kathmandu to India was opened, via Narayangadh.

In the hills, meanwhile, scores of rivers and gorges were being spanned by spidery suspension footbridges, which saved villagers hours or even days of walking. Airstrips were being hammered out in remote areas, while in the south, the plains and forests were being pierced by the Mahendra Highway which, by the early 1980s, sped east–west though the Terai in one unbroken (if not smooth) ribbon.

The pace of change seemed to slow in the 1990s, but picked up in the 2000s, as the army pushed “feeder roads” into the Maoist heartlands while government “green roads” crept towards the district capitals. In the last five years, more roads have been built in Nepal than in the last fifty, and only a handful of the country’s 75 districts now remains roadless. Even the extravagantly beautiful Kali Gandaki gorge, on the Annapurna Circuit, has been penetrated, and it now links up with the Chinese border at Mustang. The Trisuli road now creeps beyond the Langtang trailhead at Syabrubesi, and before long it will be possible to bump through to the Tibetan town of Kerung. New roads snake due south from the Kathmandu Valley, making for the Terai – and work has begun on a “fast track” link, which will reduce the journey time to India by around half. (It is supposed to hit the ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= East–West Highway at Nijgadh, where there is a proposal to build a new international airport.) Kathmandu is also supposed to get an Outer Ring Road – one day – and there’s even talk of a grand Mid Hill East–West Highway.

The perennial problem is maintenance. Foreign donors rarely fund upkeep, and with every monsoon, many roads are washed away or buried in landslides. Even Kathmandu suffers: during the monsoon in 2010, the main highway to India was blocked, causing a two-day traffic jam; that same season, the road to Tibet was shut for a week. The other, greater problem is that roads are not universal panaceas. With every new road,

barefoot porters will no longer people the trails, while only those Nepalis who can afford a bus ticket will be able to get to hospitals and universities. Cheap imports of goods and foodstuffs will arrive in ever greater quantity. And what was once a country whose every step – political, developmental, cultural – was measured at walking pace, whose people met and talked with each other (and with foreign visitors) on the hill trails, will become more like the rest of the world.

Education

Education is one of Nepal’s relative success stories: the result, perhaps, of how well respected it is in Nepali culture: “book is god”, as the saying goes. The system has certainly come a long way in a short time: before 1951 schools only existed for the children of the ruling elite, and two percent of the population was literate. There are now government primary schools within walking distance of most villages, and secondary schools in most areas of denser population, and literacy has soared to 66 percent.

Of course, that’s still an appalling figure by international standards. Government schools are chronically underfunded, especially in rural areas, and the current policy of handing over school management to communities is unlikely to address the problem. Teachers may be unqualified, poorly trained, underpaid or simply absent. Classes regularly number eighty or more, and are held in rooms with mud floors and no glazing. Toilet facilities, if they exist at all, are execrable – a major factor in putting children off school. There are rarely enough benches, let alone desks – even though many children will be off school on any given day due to illness, the need for their labour in the fields, or lack of funds to buy a book or pen, or to find the modest subscription fee.

In these conditions it’s no surprise that while three-quarters of young Nepalis now attend primary school, around half fail to finish. Girls and disadvantaged castes make up the bulk of the dropouts. Secondary attendance is under a third, and many rural secondaries fail to get even one of their final-year students through their School Leaving Certificate (SLC). As a result, any family that can afford it sends its children away to one of the legion of private “English medium” boarding schools which have sprung up in the cities and towns, teaching in the English language. Those who make it to one of Nepal’s colleges or universities often find that there’s no work for them when they graduate. Frustrated by a lack of opportunities or just plain bored, the educated youth of the cities make up a growing class of angry young men.

Women

Women have particularly low status in much of Nepal, making them exceptionally vulnerable to exploitation. Their status is generally slightly higher among the ethnic groups of the hills, and considerably so among Buddhists and in wealthy urban families, but even these women rarely enjoy true power-sharing. Rural women may still be considered their husband’s or father’s chattel. They work far harder than men, by and large: rising before dawn to clean the house, doing the hardest fieldwork and all of the cooking. Women wait for men to finish eating before they begin. Typically married off in their teens, women are often subject to institutionalized domestic violence. In orthodox Baahun families, low status is underpinned by religious ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= sanction. The touch of a menstruating woman, for example, is traditionally considered as polluting as that of an untouchable. During their menstrual period, or in the wake of childbirth, women in the far west may still be sent into ritual seclusion.

It’s estimated that each year, some 10–15,000 Nepali girls and women – twenty percent of them under the age of sixteen – are trafficked into sexual slavery. Kathmandu’s sex industry is burgeoning, but most are bound for India, where Nepali girls are reputed for beauty (partly on account of their relative pallor), purity and supposed lack of inhibition. To poor families in Nepal, a daughter is a financial burden; when a broker comes offering

Nepal’s “untouchables” (see p.395) – are still held back by poverty, lack of education and flagrant discrimination. Thanks in part to Maoist pressure, the Constitutional Assembly has taken significant steps to improve political representation, and the old barriers are breaking down in the cities, but it is unlikely that attitudes will change quickly at village level. The pre-Maoist democratic government did act dramatically in 2000 to free the kamaiyas (bonded labourers), victims of a system of indentured servitude prevalent in the mid- and far west. Unfortunately, it failed to accompany the liberation with any policy on land redistribution or job training, with the result that most kamaiyas found themselves suddenly homeless and jobless.

thousands of rupees for a pubescent girl, many agree. This trade is most pronounced in the Central Hills north of Kathmandu, where it has historical roots: Tamang girls were forced to serve as court concubines for generations, and some men are still complicit in the enslavement of their own female relatives. A sex worker may eventually buy her freedom, but few escape without acquiring HIV or are able to return to their home communities.

One solution to women’s low status is to boost education and earning power. The Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank and the Nepali government’s Production Credit for Rural Women programme, make microcredit loans to small, self-organizing groups of women, and support the borrowers with literacy, family-planning and other training. Another route is political. Legally, the position of women has vastly improved in recent years, with the Maoists being particularly vociferous about improving the status of women; female involvement in the insurgency has presented Nepal with a new image of women’s empowerment.

Children

However much their parents love them, children in poor families are counted as an economic resource from an early age. Child labour has always been essential in agriculture, and despite laws barring employment of anyone of fourteen or under, more than half of all Nepali children between six and fourteen work. They are often porters, domestic servants and labourers in the brick and construction industries – menial or hazardous jobs, by and large – and some are forced into the sex trade. Children working in domestic service are also at risk of sexual abuse, and there are cases of foreign paedophiles preying on Kathmandu’s numerous – and exceptionally vulnerable – street children.

Some children are effectively sold by their families into “adoption” rackets – though little of the money received by the foreign agency ever gets back to the family. Many Western countries have now frozen adoption of Nepali children. Other children find their way into “orphanages” in Nepal or India, where income from charitable donations may be milked by the management, and toys brought by well-meaning volunteers may be sold on when the volunteer leaves his or her placement. Among Kathmandu’s four hundred-odd orphanages there are some excellent ones, but many poor or corrupt ones too – the worst may be fronts for organized abuse. There is a registration scheme, but it’s not backed up by government vetting.

ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= Trade and industry

Agriculture simply cannot absorb the country’s growing workforce, and unemployment and underemployment are rife. Nepal also desperately needs to earn foreign exchange to pay for the imported technology and materials it needs for development. All of this means boosting industry, which in Nepal’s case accounts for an unusually low proportion of gross domestic product – import values are roughly six times those of exports.

Other countries in the region have used their low wages and high unemployment to attract the sweatshops of Western brand-name companies. Without a seaport, Nepal

can’t even do that. It achieved surprising success in the 1990s, with carpet manufacture, though the industry has collapsed since due to quality-control problems, bad PR over child labour, saturation of the market and undercutting by more mechanized competitors. Where once one million Nepalis worked in the industry, the number is now less than a tenth of that. Pashmina (cashmere) items have seen less dramatic rises and falls, while ready-made clothes and shoes seem to be on the up. Beer and cigarettes, curiously enough, are two other success stories, alongside the more prosaic bricks and cement, and agricultural products like sugar and timber (most of the latter being illegally exported). There is also a brisk trade in Himalayan medicinal herbs, along with the fabled yarsagumba caterpillar, which is used as a stimulant and aphrodisiac, and various essential oils. In herbs and medicines, there is a thriving illegal market.

Recent liberalization of rules on foreign ownership and investment may stimulate entrepreneurship but in many of its industries, Nepal finds itself in a classic Third World bind. Even if it could fairly access external markets, it can’t compete with high-volume market leaders in manufacture. But importing even modest amounts of high-value items quickly runs up a nasty trade deficit. The government therefore subsidizes the production of run-of-the-mill goods for domestic consumption, according to the economic theory of import substitution: for a country short on foreign exchange, a penny saved is a penny earned.

Nepal’s main trading partner, India, is as much a part of the problem as it is the solution. It levies high import duties to protect its own industries, thus benefiting Nepali border traders (who can sell imported goods for less than their Indian competitors), but crippling Nepali exporters (whose goods become uncompetitive with duty added on). The balance of power is so disproportionate that India can always present Nepal with take-it-or-leave-it terms of trade. Thus, when India imposed a “luxury tax” on Nepali tea leaves, it instantly pulled the rug from under the Nepali growers’ market.

Tourism

Nepal has three religions, or so the saying goes: Hinduism, Buddhism and tourism. The last is Nepal’s top foreign-exchange earner (not counting the massive remittances from migrant workers). Around 800,000 tourists a year bring in some $700 million, and give work to roughly half a million people. With the return of relative political stability, and the growth of tourism from India and China, visitor arrivals to Nepal are once again growing, but the infrastructure to cope with them is still lacking – and all tourism jobs tend to be both seasonal and intensely vulnerable to economic and political downturns. The fruits of tourism, so arbitrarily awarded, have turned legions of Nepalis into panhandlers, in much the same way that aid has done to politicians and institutions. And while tourism can claim some credit for shaping Nepal’s environmental record, it has imposed its own ecological and cultural costs. Independent trekking may encourage tourists to spend money at the local level in rural areas, but it has placed an environmental strain on the fragile “honeypot” areas in the mountains.

Kathmandu Valley problems Solutions often create their own problems. For five decades, people have been ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= trying to get Nepal to develop – now that it has, in the Kathmandu Valley, many are nervously fumbling for the “off” switch. Overpopulation and conflict has driven a growing rural exodus; new roads and bus services pull the landless poor away from their villages, while jobs in the tourism and manufacturing industries push them towards the Kathmandu Valley. Many immigrants land jobs in the big city, but there’s no safety net for those who don’t. They may end up squatting in unhealthy shacks on waste ground, in empty buildings, in the streets – and scrounging a living from the rubbish heaps or prostitution.

Most of Nepal’s institutional problems – bureaucracy, corruption – are common to most poor countries, but some may be unique to Nepal. One of Nepal’s foremost anthropologists, Dor Bahadur Bista, controversially argued that along with Nepalis’ beguilingly relaxed ke garne (“what to do?”) attitude comes a crippling fatalism. Responsibility is supposedly passed on to higher-ups (whether a boss, an astrologer or a deity), and the relationship between present work and future goals glossed over, resulting in haphazard planning. Nepali society also values connections very highly. The cult of the aafno maanche (one’s “own man”) makes it hard for minorities to advance, while the tradition of patronage ensures that loyalty is rewarded rather than skill or innovation.

While poverty is a perennial problem in the valley, it is prosperity that’s creating the brand-new headaches, starting with traffic and pollution caused by a fleet of vehicles that is doubling every six to eight years. Smoke from brick kilns has long contributed to air pollution in the valley, as has its geographical shape as a bowl into which cool air sinks, trapping pollutants – but new vehicle emissions are blamed for the alarming increase in respiratory problems (asthma, allergies, lead-related developmental disorders in children), which now occur at twelve times the national average in Kathmandu. Those who can afford to are moving out to the suburbs – but then they have to commute by vehicle. On the positive side, the success of electric-powered Safaa (“clean”) tempos is providing a highly visible reminder that there are cleaner alternatives. Assuming there is power, that is: centralized “load-shedding” threatens the viability of all electric vehicles, as there simply may not be enough time to recharge their batteries.

In Kathmandu, demand for drinking water vastly exceeds the supply, with the result that residents pump what water they can get up to rooftop storage tanks, and supplement it with deliveries by tanker. Leaks account for most of the shortfall, but development money, chasing the mega-project as ever, is all going to the $700 million Melamchi project, which plans to pipe water from the Helambu area northeast of the valley through a 27km tunnel. Almost twenty years late at the time of writing, millions over budget, and mired in corruption and environmental controversy (it will desiccate irrigated farmland downstream of the tunnel mouth in the dry season), the big donors have withdrawn one by one. The Asian Development Bank is one of the few to stay the course, but has insisted on the part-privatization of Kathmandu’s water supply as a condition for its loan. Demand is likely to have overtaken supply by the time Melamchi comes on tap.

Water is not only scarce in the valley, it’s also contaminated by sewage permeating the soil and infiltrating old, leaky pipes. Less than a third of the valley’s sewage is properly treated, as municipal treatment plants don’t operate properly and raw waste and toxic effluents drain directly into rivers. Rubbish is another problem, and the valley’s municipalities still haven’t agreed on a permanent dump: the Gokarna landfill in the valley is full, and the “temporary” site established at Sisdol, 25km north of Kathmandu, is frequently closed off by protesting locals. Rubbish is often dumped in horrific landfills right beside the Bagmati River, or burned, adding to air pollution. The damage that has been done to the valley’s culture in the name of progress is less easy to quantify, but is arguably more profound. Traditional architecture is only ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= valued by a few. Members of the younger generation are drifting away from the religion of their parents. Guthi (charitable organizations) are in decline and have been forced to leave the upkeep of many temples to foreign preservationists. Tourism has robbed crafts of their ritual purpose and performance arts of their meaning. Work and schooling outside the home has loosened once-tight family ties, and the influx of strangers – especially refugees from the Maoist conflict, including thousands of families whose homes were destroyed or requisitioned – has introduced social tensions and crime.

To an encouraging extent, valley residents are prepared to accept these problems as the price of progress: a little pollution or crime may seem a fair trade for improvements that keep children from dying and give people greater control over their lives. But, increasingly, Kathmanduites are worrying that they might have a “Silent Spring” in the making. What will be the effects on their children of growing up breathing air, drinking water and eating food that is not only contaminated with germs but also laced with chemicals and heavy metals?

The future

Many development workers succumb to periodic despair. Every solution seems to create more problems. Better health and sanitation increases population growth, for example – and will do until poverty and the status of women is addressed. In the meantime, agriculture has to be improved to feed all those new mouths, deforestation must be reversed to solve the fuel wood and fodder crisis, and industry developed. So

irrigation projects, roads and hydroelectric schemes are needed – all requiring foreign support. If development is left entirely to Nepalis, better education is required, which means addressing the poverty that prevents children attending classes and teachers from working in rural areas.

Encouragingly, it’s the newcomers to the field that tend to be the gloomiest. Older hands can see the slow successes behind the seemingly intractable problems. Literacy, life expectancy and access to health care have all improved. Community forests are re-greening the hills. Microhydro and micro-loan schemes are bringing power – real and metaphorical – into remote areas. And, most excitingly, Nepalis themselves are demanding change. Women’s groups are combating domestic violence, alcoholism and gambling. Environmentalists are pioneering a renewed concern for woodland and wildlife. Activists are doing anything from building community trekking lodges and leading birdwatching walks for children to picking up litter in Kathmandu’s Ratna Park –small steps, maybe, but signifying a refreshing culture of home-grown activism. For all the many problems besieging this terrifyingly young, post-monarchical republic, a smell of spring is undoubtedly in the air.

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