Unfair hike

It is unfortunate that the only state run children’s hospital in the country- Kanti Children Hospital - has raised its service charge without giving prior notice to the public. This rise has no doubt affected thousands of people, especially the poor, who come to Kathmandu to seek paediatric medical care.

Kanti Children Hospital raised its medical service charges from 50 to 2,400 percent. This decision is bound to hit not well - off families economically hard. The poor, who cannot afford medical services at private health institutions, have been coming to Kanti hospital mainly because of lower service charge. The recent move by Kanti Children Hospital has, however, dashed the hopes of those who believe that government hospitals are meant for providing service to the poor.

The hike has been justified by the hospital administration on the ground that the price of medical equipment has increased in the international market. Whatever the case, the Ministry of Health has to intervene because the government cannot forget its welfare function altogether. It is therefore important for the relevant departments to rectify this totally unfair hike of medical service at Kanti Children Hospital. A formal investigation has to be undertaken to determine the causes behind this steep rise in service charge. If the service charge hike is justified, then the government must subsidize so as to readjust service charges. The burden on the poor must be considered first and foremost. The government should not balk away from its responsibility in such an important sector as health and especially, when it concerns children.

The issue comes in the background of the dire state of general health services in the country. All major hospitals of the country are located in Kathmandu. Doctors also prefer to remain in the capital, while health posts and other medical facilities in the outlying regions are undermanned by unqualified junior medical personnel. In such a situation, it is quite natural for common people to flock to the capital in search of proper medical services. However, with this hike, those who seek affordable medical service for children, will be forced to turn back. The back-breaking service charge hike is likely to put poor children at great risk of being left untreated and in mortal danger. In such a scenario, the government cannot remain a mute spectator. One possible solution will be to provide more incentives to doctors to go to rural areas. This will not only lessen the flow of those seeking medical attention to Kathmandu, but will also go a long way in improving facilities in rural areas.

Countless children and their parents will suffer due to the service charge hike at Kanti Children Hospital. Therefore, it is important for the related authorities to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. The government must act with the recognition that it is totally unjust that common people and their children should suffer needlessly.

IT opportunities for national development

By Dr Jagadish Sharma

Every political system we have experimented with has been bedevilled by poverty and its concomitants, inaccessible, rugged geographical terrain, and illiteracy. The present multiparty system of democracy is no exception. We may not have actually fared any better in our urgent task of obliterating poverty and illiteracy. Besides, we may have added to ourselves the new political menace of Maoist insurgency. Since there is no alternative but to make the present system work, the present proposal is being put forward for general scrutiny.

Corruption: Corruption is rampant in the country and political leaders are the widely alleged culprits. One may not be inclined to engage at this juncture in supporting or refuting the allegation as such, but it may very well be true that political leaders being what they are, may not be any more or less corrupt than their counterparts elsewhere. If there is any culprit, it is poverty itself: not the starkly manifest poverty of physical sorts as much as the poverty of mental and intellectual kind, the inability to manage our own available resources and eliminate waste.

IT opportunities: In order to eliminate poverty, there is need to accumulate wealth, which can be done only by mobilizing the available resources and reducing waste. We are presently witnessing the onset of a new era of Knowledge and Information Technology (IT), with all the potential for changing the very nature of physical existence of mankind. Industrial revolution has passed us by but we can ill afford to let the IT revolution do the same to us.

In the age of IT, it is knowledge, which matters most. Human resource is harder to come by than capital and technology. The geographical barriers have shrunk and the world has already become a global village. Rich and developed countries such as the United States are increasingly outsourcing their requirements to be serviced from countries like India and Nepal. We do enjoy a natural advantage of being ahead of the United States by almost twelve hours, which very much works to our advantage.

In IT enabled services like medical transcription, medical practitioners in the US can have their dictated medical files transmitted to us through the internet before they go to bed and receive the same back in transcribed document form by the time they arrive at their office early in the morning. Medical Transcription itself, as a business, presently amounts to some twenty billion US dollars and is growing at the rate of twenty percent a year. But medical transcription is just the tip of the iceberg. There are other IT enabled services such as back office operations, call centres, insurance billing, to name a few, which are even more high paying and profitable and are being increasingly outsourced to countries in the subcontinent. We do have in Nepal a large number of English speaking students who can be trained in a very short period of time to qualify as skilled personnel to deliver such services and earn a great deal of money for themselves and the country as a whole. The educational requirement need not be very high for such personnel.

Those who have passed their high school examination (SLC) would qualify. About two hundred thousand students appear in the SLC exams every year out of which seventy thousand (35 percent) pass. If a sincere effort is made to drastically improve the success rate by means of enhancing proficiency level in the English language, the subject in which most fail, a lot of economic, social, and human waste the nation as a whole has to presently endure, would substantially go down.

But even assuming it to be a hypothetical case, there is no reason why one hundred and thirty thousand of those who fail cannot be assimilated as a productive force by means of intensive training in English language and necessary basic skills. There is hence no reason why we cannot have one million strong manpower every five years with continued annual increments to be employed in IT enabled services.

Investment: As far as investment is concerned, there is about ninety billion rupees worth of untapped and unused capital in the country. In the absence of investment opportunities, banks are shying away from collecting the same as savings and consequently have lowered the interest rates to a record low. As a result, this vast amount of capital is presently facing the risk of going out of the country. If a national consensus can be reached in launching ourselves into IT business, there is no reason why HMG cannot tap this enormous amount as IT bond for building the necessary infrastructure for the already planned high-tech city and utilization by the private sector. In view of the returns that can be made, the amount can be multiplied tenfold annually.

National consensus: But to ensure against possible misuse and vagaries of political strikes and unrest, it is first and foremost essential to reach a multiparty consensus on the proposal. Only a national consensus of this sort will impart it a character of collective participation and at the same time enable us to institutionalize necessary countermeasures against possible misuse.

To sum up, a task of this magnitude can help us launch into the age of Information Technology with the potential of obliterating poverty and illiteracy from the country.

Amassing thousands of billions of rupees by employing one million young people in the course of four to five years will have its own trickle down effect socially, economically and politically. Illiteracy, inaccessibility, and incidents like Maoist insurgencies will be things of the past and the nation will usher in a new era of peace, prosperity, and happiness.

The king’s role: The role His Majesty the King could play in facilitating the nation to bring about a national consensus on the proposal just made can hardly be overstated. No sane person may have paid any serious attention to the question whether a poor country like Nepal can afford the luxury of maintaining an institution like monarchy. The unfortunate incident of Pravin Gurung may have cast some aspersions on the institution. But constitutional monarchy is already an inalienable part of our national life and the constitution.

Besides, King Birendra’s strict adherence to playing the role of a constitutional monarch has greatly enhanced the prestige and aura of the institution of monarchy. It may in fact have freed the king from confining himself to governance and may have instead enabled him to broaden his contacts with a wide variety of people, including the leaders of various political parties. A review of statements issued from the palace over the years also indicates that the king has not entirely absolved himself from his own responsibilities towards his subjects and the nation as a whole, even though it may have appeared to some that he prefers to remain a mute spectator now that he does not enjoy any effective power.

His Majesty the King like any enlightened person in the country is equally responsible for keeping vigil on problems such as the menace of Maoist insurgency presently bedevilling us. Eternal vigilance may indeed be the price one pays for liberty. Conspicuous absence of initiatives on his part to bring about national consensus on issues such as water resources and citizenship may have prompted some to conclude that the king may as well continue to enjoy watching the whole spectacle as a bystander since the problems that are presently bugging us are not of his own making and hence he may limit himself to playing the role of a constitutional monarch. This scribe does not at all subscribe to this view.

As a constitutional monarch, the king may very rightly not want to involve himself in any partisan politics as such but he can persuade, advise, and warn the political representatives who rule in his name to formulate plans and programmes he deems beneficial for the country and the people inhabiting it. The above mentioned proposal on utilizing the opportunities Information Technology is providing us at the moment may indeed be the kind he may want to actively pursue if he wants to redeem those of us who think that it is a very small price the nation has to pay in sustaining monarchy especially in view of how much it can do for us and the country as a whole.

After all, local caterers are there for you

By Sarah Rai

Many times we have heard that tourists in Kathmandu are harassed by street vendors, local guides and also duped by taxi drivers. More than once we have read how the street-side Romeos in Thamel and other major tourist spots pass lecherous remarks at foreign ladies. We the citizens of Kathmandu also have to bear the brunt, due to the simple fact that we are Nepalis and not foreigners! Just last week, my two sisters and I had to go to Thamel to order some embroidered T-shirts. As soon as we got off our car, we felt totally alienated. No, not because we looked alarmingly different or anything like that. The annoying stares of shopkeepers and locals made us uncomfortable. The T-shirt shopkeeper was friendly and told us to wait at least two hours. So we decided to walk around and have lunch. We went into quite a number of shops where the attendants would try to mollify us, mistaking us for oriental tourists. As soon as we opened our mouths, they realized their mistake and withdrew into a cold shell, giving just a callous shrug to our queries. They would even give us one word answers like "expensive" with a stiff upper lip and leave it at that, assuming we would not buy anything. We did, by the way, buy a lot of stuff that took our fancy. Unfortunately, we had the ill luck of walking into one "foreign" bakery. The bakery was packed with tourists, so we walked into the garden which had a self-service food counter. Nothing looked appetizing to us. There was just an array of bread rolls with coffee or tea so we decided to go some place else.

As we were walking out, the waiters at the counter had the cheek to yell out "No thukpa, no momo, no dal bhat!". The management did nothing about it, actually we had sensed their antagonism the moment we walked in. The three of us walked out with dignity and walked into another bakery (bearing a desi name), across the "foreign" bakery. The place was packed with tourists but still a waiter ushered us to a vacant table. We settled down to soothing cups of "Cappuccino" and ordered our meal. Unlike in the "foreign" bakery , here, the staff were friendly and polite; we didn’t feel out of place, and moreover, the food was delicious. It has happened in many restaurants that they serve food according to the customer. That is, ‘lasagnia’ served to tourists will be much better than the ones served to Nepalis. Not at the "desi" bakery though, everyone was treated to large helpings of original fare.

At last, full and satisfied we thanked and tipped the waiters generously and decided, with gusto, to walk back to the "foreign" bakery. Once there, we gave the nonchalant fellows, a good piece of our mind! They were dumbfounded. And we? Jubiliant !

Who’s afraid of a constitutional review ?

By M R Josse

Asingular political development, more or less coinciding with the observance of the tenth year of the November 1990 Constitution, has hinged around increasing appeals/demands for reviewing, amending or even replacing that document.

Debate: Before proceeding any further, let us first briefly recall some of those voices, beginning with King Birendra’s.

In a recent message to the nation on Constitution Day, the monarch argued that "a rational and balanced evaluation" is called for with regard to "our endeavours and achievements along with the shortcomings experienced so far." Such an en masse soul-searching exercise, King Birendra maintained, is required "if" democracy is to be "consolidated".

Though innocuous sounding at first reading, it clearly implies that, in the King’s view, shortcomings have been noticed in the Basic Law and that, democracy has not been consolidated — as yet. In other words, the King has made a softly-worded, cogent, if brief, case for a thorough review of the Constitution.

ML’s Bamdev Gautam, in a recent public utterance in Sindhuli, stated plainly that changes are needed in the 10-year old Constitution. Earlier, he had gone on record favouring a system of proportional representation in parliament. Such an innovation would plainly necessitate a constitutional amendment.

All that is, of course, in stark contrast with what Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and his party colleagues have been saying on the matter. Koirala, for example, insisted at a recent public function in Kathmandu, that the Constitution — supposedly like Caesar’s wife — is not to be faulted!

As such, he argued that it was not "wise" to seek "repeated amendments" — although it is well known that the present Constitution has not, thus far, been amended even once.

Speaker Taranath Ranabhat, a Nepali Congress stalwart, for his part has lamented publicly that talk of constitutional reforms were, oddly enough, taking place when the present Constitution had yet to be "fully implemented".

Then, there is the lambent comment from former Speaker Daman Nath Dhungana, another leading light of the Nepali Congress and one of the few individuals who had a direct hand in the drafting of the Constitution.

Referring to the constitutional problems identified by UML’s Madhav Kumar Nepal, another political figure who helped to shape the present Constitution, Dhungana responded: "I don’t see any reason why these problems cannot be resolved within the framework of the Constitution."

Problems galore: As for the UML strongman himself, it may be enough for our purposes here to recall that he has argued for amendment of the Constitution to — as a recent report in this daily had it — "address some of the pressing issues of Nepali society, such as corruption, land reform, election irregularities, review of parliamentary constituencies based on population changes, and above all, fair representation of ethnic groups and nationalities in the national mainstream."

Another political stalwart known to be somewhat of an original thinker, Rajeshor Devkota, formerly of the RPP (Chand), has publicly and bluntly declared : "The present Constitution is outdated. It should be scrapped."

Lawmaker Rajendra Mahato of the NSP — which, a couple of years back, publicly torched a copy of the Constitution — for his part claimed that the Constitution does not represent the feelings of all the people, arguing that it should provide for reservation of backward communities on the basis of population and a federal system of governance.

Are the constitutional chickens of inconsistencies finally coming home to roost? Be that as it may, one recalls the bitter controversy that erupted over the Supreme Court’s August 1995 verdict which came under fire for encroaching on the premier’s prerogative to dissolve parliament and to order fresh polls.

Would that have happened if ambiguities or lacunae were non-existent in the Constitution? Besides, who doesn’t know that in the past the prerogative of the prime minister and the supremacy of parliament have come into conflict — another example of constitutional ambiguity. Should such not be eliminated?

At the layman’s level, one may question if, as repeatedly claimed, the 1990 Constitution is indeed truly representative of the ENTIRE Nepalese socio-political spectrum.

Surely, such a blanket claim cannot be upheld as it was principally selected, not elected, Nepali Congress representatives along with those of the UML that drafted the 1990 Constitution. And weren’t
the King’s nominees, too, apparently tailored to appease specifically those two parties?

Besides, who doesn’t know that the whole business of Constitution-drafting was rushed through in a matter of six months? Why? Was it wise to have swung from the extreme of an all-powerful monarchy to a virtually impotent one, given its traditional role as a national unifier and symbol of the state?

One truly wonders how — and why — Constitution-framers decided to throw out the Zone of Peace provision when such is surely not inconsistent with multi-party democracy, besides being sorely needed for a small state in these uncertain times?

Questions: Did that reflect the national consensus, too? Or, was it not executed merely to please certain extraneous lobbies that NC/UML leaders will not name publicly? One must also question why no system of recall of errant MPs was instituted?

Plainly, a thorough and civilised national debate on the Constitution — its strong points and its flaws — should be initiated with a view to its amendment, in a holistic not piece-meal fashion, in order to strength parliamentary democracy.

To ignore that imperative is to pave the way for those, like the Maoists, who promise to kill it. Let’s therefore not be afraid to take the amendment bull by its horns — before it is too late!