Meticulous separation 

Who could have imagined the Nepalese Siamese twins, Ganga and Jamuna, born in an impoverished family, would make it out of the operation theatre in Singapore, as two separate individuals? Just a few months ago, it seemed to be a far-fetched dream. Thanks to the Singaporean surgical team and the Singapore’s Gurkha community, the eleven-month-old Siamese twins have been separated successfully after a gruelling ordeal and complex surgery. Were they in Nepal, one could have easily surmised their fate.

Enmeshed at the top of the heads with a single skull cavity, the complex and complicated surgery on the twins stretched for over 90 hours. A team of medical experts worked round-the clock since last Friday. Now that the operation has been successful, and with it the long and agonizing wait of their parents and for many back home is over, but not completely. The post-surgery care calls for sophisticated medical treatment and equipment, which naturally means more expenses. So far, the cost of medical treatment has been borne by the heaps of donations and charity offered by magnanimous and compassionate people, both Nepalese and Singaporeans. But the Nepali government has done little or nothing to facilitate their medical treatment. Given the country’s dismal health status and poor medical facilities, it would be overbearing to expect an enormous help from the government. This does not, however, mean that the government can put off its duty and continue tinkling its begging bowl. If the government has some sense of responsibility, it must step in immediately to help the Nepalese twins, one of the world’s rarest cases, sail through the recuperation period. We wish the two girls a speedy recovery.

Numerous international health reports and experts have made it clear that the morality rate, deformity at birth and pregnancy - related complications are notoriously high in our country. Unfortunately, no efforts worth mentioning have been made to correct the unhealthy health sector. The case of Siamese twins is an example of unregistered birth complications. This case no doubt is highly complex and challenging, but thousands of children die of epidemic and preventable diseases every year in our country. With the onset of summer, children are vulnerable to deadly diseases like gastroenteritis, cholera, encephalitis, malaria and so on. But it has become customary; the government wakes up only after many young lives succumb to these preventable and seasonal diseases and when things spin out of their control. A huge budget has been allocated for security measures and other regular expenditure but every year almost invariably this crucial sector gets ignored. The case of Siamese twins should serve as a wake up call to allocate an adequate budget for health in the upcoming budget.

Fighting corruption at grass root level

By Sanjay Prakash

Early people earned to live, now they live to earn. Obviously, the transformed attitude has pushed ethics of an individual out of its own reach. To achieve the sole objective of earning money or satisfying their endless desire, people use short-cuts to reach. Once the individual takes on to the short-cuts, paved by fraudulent activities, he becomes deaf to the voice of his conscience. It is not that people are unaware of their acts as there is a basic difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. So, ultimately one is trapped in the web of short-cuts or the all-powerful "money".

The cursory review of the history shows that 1996 saw successive trials of political leaders and ministerial resignations in the wake of corruption scandals in Belgium, Italy, India, South Korea and elsewhere. These are a few examples that make clear that corruption is not confined to developing countries and that national anti-corruption laws can be enforced even against those at the very top. However, frequently corruption trials are politically motivated and those in power to bolster their position at the expense of the their opponents use the laws.

Sometimes corruption is home grown but all too often international business corporations are seen to have bribed political leaders and public officials in other countries or to have funded political parties in a way which threatens the proper working of the democratic process.

The prime concern is with ‘the misuse of public power for private benefit’, often called grand corruption. Grand corruption usually involves the giving of a benefit to a political leader or senior public official by a businessman in return for a decision in his favour. Usually, something that the leader should not do and that is also likely to be illegal.

Grand corruption means that important decisions are taken by high officials responsible for public funds for personal motives and disregarding the consequences to the wider community.

Grand corruption leads to increased transaction costs and reduces predictability. It also impedes sustainable development because it distorts the decision-making process and leads to the wrong people being awarded the wrong projects at the wrong prices.

In the book titled Grand Corruption : How Business Bribes Damage Development Countries (Oxford, 1997), British businessman George Moody Stuart writes that "development based on corrupt practices has driving forces with particular characteristics such as: a focus towards large scale capital-intensive investment and away from those which maximize use of local labour and resources, inadequate care for protecting the environment and decisions taken secretly outside normal government procedures and with little or no consultation".

As such over-centralization, limited administrative capabilities, laxity of tax administration and authoritarian tendencies have combined to provide fertile conditions for corruption in many developing countries like Nepal. A cursory look at the elimination efforts of corruption in Nepal dates back to 1953, when the government formally came with Corrupt Practice Eradication Act and subsequently, established the Anti-Corruption Department under this Act. The provisions of that Act were found inadequate for the purpose of eliminating corrupt practice; the Public Servants Act was enacted in 1956, under which the Anti-Corruption Department was replaced by the Special Police Department. Eventually, the laws relating to corruption were unified under the prevention of Corruption Act 1960. Recently, the Commission for Investigation for the Abuse of Authority (CIAA) is taking care of the corruption case with less ammunition.

All acts of corruption exhibit the following characteristics: They involve more than one person; on the whole, they involve secrecy except in situations whereby they have become so rampant and deeply rooted that some powerful individuals or those under their protection would not bother to hide their activities; they involve an element of mutual obligation and mutual benefit; those who engage in them usually attempt to camouflage their activities by restoring to some sort of lawful justification. They avoid open clash with the law; those involved in them want definite decisions from those who are able to influence those decisions; they involve betrayal of trust; they involve contradictory dual functions of those committing the act; and they violate the norm of duty and responsibility within the civic order.

These acts can broadly be classified into three categories: extortion, nepotism and bribery.

In many developing and the least developed countries, corrupt practices serve as means by which the western inspired bureaucracy and administrative systems are reconnected to indigenous realities and adopted to the every day life of the people. For one acts of corruption sometimes function as redistribute mechanisms which allow the disadvantaged groups in society to gain access to and avail of the required goods and services from the government.

For the most part, however, corruption is simply a means to cope and survive the complex requirements and stringent impositions of an alien bureaucracy. On the part of the corrupting party, for example, bribery is simply a more efficient and probably much safer means to gain access to productive and subsistence resources they need than committing acts of violent resistance. On the part of the corrupted civil servants, on the other hand, soliciting money or gifts from those seeking favour is far easier than applying loans from their respective agencies. In one of the national English dailies published from Kathmandu, it was stated that it has always been believed that employment in revenue administration in the name of specialization is taking undue advantage of the opportunity and the accountability they have to show in their career. As it has been said the kar ma basyo bhane ghar baninchha, bhansar ma basiyo bhane sansar baninchha (if you work in the tax office, you build a house while in the customs you make your own world).

If bureaucratic corruption is a coping mechanism that evolves out of the need to reconnect the bureaucracy to the realities of the day to day existence of the people in society, then how did it evolve over time?

First, we have to recognize that social norms and value systems are accumulated experiences of successful collective coping mechanism over time. As such, they are more difficult to change just to suit an alien notion of what an ideal public administrative system should be.

This being the case, efforts should be undertaken towards reorienting government administrative practices to make them suitable to the prevailing norms and values rather than the other way round. It is only when the government bureaucracy could prove and assert its role as the protector of the collective sentiment of the members of society that efforts to address corruption could actually be more successful.

As such the recommended strategy for controlling corruption, among others, be: honesty should flow from top down; create an atmosphere under which the chances for indulging in corrupt practices are kept down to the minimum. While doing so, if there is corruption, the corrupt should be taken to the court for punishment. It is against this backdrop, both curative and preventive measures should be adopted and implemented accordingly.

The elusive smell

By C B Dahal

Ever wondered why some people possess this power of magnetic attraction that stops you dead in your tracks? Or some whose odour forced you to wrinkle your nose? The answer: human smell compound - pheromones.

You must have passed someone who made you stop in your tracks, sniffed, turned around and let your nose lead you back seeking the mysterious source bearer. And when you locate the person, sit or stand as close to be able to inhale the...

It is not the perfume anyway! And yet the very tinge makes you mad, inching its way into your system in a combustive attack on your nervous system. You close your eyes and wave, panting for more...

The guilty one is called pheromones. And like your perfumes and deodorants, it can be bought for a price in choice spray bottles. Surprisingly, pheromones do not smell, but some cells in the nose can detect even a minuscule atom wafting near you.

The pheromones have no smell, then how does it influence human behaviour?

Pheromones are detected by vomero-nasal organ, a structure in the nose. Pheromones circumvent the tentacles of our conscious senses. In humans it is produced under the arms. They are said to be essential chemicals used by individuals of the same species to chemically communicate with each other, eliciting specific passionate behaviour. In mammals, these chemical signals more prominently detected. Researchers have found that female ovulation can be regulated, made longer or shorter, by using pheromones.

It is believed human body odour influences the female in her selection of mate to find a partner that possesses fitting system components. Scientists have been able to establish positive correlation between facial attractiveness and sexiness to the body female odour. In other words, the more symmetric a body of a woman, the more sexy her smell. This possibly is the reason why certain types of opposite sex get attract with each other. And, sex life is seriously disrupted if the vomero-nasal organ is blocked.

Chemistry playing at its best?

But there are two different chemicals in human sweat that triggered specific electrical activity in the vomero-nasal organ: one that works on men, the other on women.

Odours, emission accelerate puberty, control women’s menstrual cycles and even influence sexual orientation/disorientation. Pheromones also help us differentiate close friends and relatives from strangers, and also affect how often we have sex, and with whom.

So when you find someone whose smell is offensive, acrid and stale it is likely that your pheromones is asking you to head for greener and more palatable pastures and leave that person to some one whose chemistry approves.

Hope your sniff will be more to your liking today.

Armageddon now !

By M R Josse

As this is being written, there are reports that the two ordinances — relating respectively to the creation of the Armed Police Force (APF) and regional administrators — that could not secure parliamentary approval even sixty days after they were issued will be re-promulgated.

Hanky-panky: Arguably, the fate of the two said ordinances is only the tip of the political iceberg that threatens not merely to sink the Girija Prasad Koirala-captained Nepali Congress ship of state but, very possibly, to set in motion a train of events that may have even greater far-reaching consequences.

For what lurks dangerous beneath the surface is not merely that parliament could not conduct any business during a span of two long months but also that the government’s inability to check the Maoist insurrection has been thoroughly exposed to the world, as the massacre of 35 policemen on a single day recently so gruesomely underlined — despite the APF and the costly modern weapons that have been made available to it.

The inevitable question on the lips of most citizens today is this: how much longer are we to tolerate this unsettling state of affairs? A related query is: should the entire nation to be held hostage to Koirala’s continued political longevity?

Unpalatable is that our glorified lawmakers have had not the slightest compunction about enjoying their salaries and allowances, the latter alone estimated at over 6 million rupees for the past two months — without working. You might say all this is totally in keeping with the inimitable traditions of our "Pajero" politicians!

While the crux of the problem — the demand for Koirala’s resignation on a host of issues, including the Lauda air deal scandal, its transparent inability to maintain law and order in the land or to provide any semblance of governance — remains unresolved, there are copious indications that the anger and frustration of the people, targeted squarely at the government, will explode on the streets shortly, no doubt with dire consequences for this poor nation and its suffering citizens.

However, to come back to the ordinances, it hardly requires a professional crystal-ball gazer to predict that there will not be any basic change in the ground situation even if the King obliges the government by agreeing to their re-promulgation.

Incidentally, despite all the frothy rhetoric that has spewed forth from Singha Durbar and/or Baluwatar of late regarding the unconstitutionality of methods employed to oust the prime minister, it remains a fact that it was his government that wilfully and cynically violated the basic norms of democratic governance by attempting to by-pass parliament in the matter relating to the ordinances, in the very first place.

Parliament by-passed: Here it may also be germane to recall that it was Koirala, during his first innings as premier, who had sought — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — to by-pass parliament by terming the controversial Tanakpur Treaty signed in New Delhi in December 1991 as an "understanding".

It may also be moot to remember two other facts of political life: one, that the Panchayat edifice was not brought down by constitutional means; and, two, that, as recent events in the Philippines have vividly demonstrated, even an elected head of state can be brought down by "people power" — when popular perception of wrong-doings at the very top crosses all limits. What is not mentioned too often in public debate here is that there is no provision in the 1990 Constitution for the impeachment of a prime minister nor, for that matter, for the recall of members of parliament perceived as not doing their jobs. How very, very convenient, don’t you think?

With respect to the ordinances, it may be recalled that the government not only wilfully avoided a debate on drafting appropriate laws to deal with the Maoist insurgency during earlier sessions of parliament but that it rushed to issue them just two days before the just-prorogued nineteenth session was formally announced! Is this not blatant hanky-panky?

Now, despite its inability — its majority in parliament notwithstanding — to have the ordinances adopted by parliament within sixty days of their promulgation, it is once again hell-bent on travelling the same dead-end route.

To be sure, what has helped create an environment of utter despair in the land today are ubiquitous signs that our nascent democracy has been transformed, alas, into a raging kleptocracy.

While the latter has been written about in a previous column, its significance was particularly brought home to me when, at a recent social event, an articulate, well-known Congress activist/intellectual confessed that not only is Koirala’s leadership proving too costly for the nation but — surprise, surprise — that the very political system brought about by the Jana Andolan has been derailed by plain and simple greed!

In his view — with which I totally agree — the multi-party vehicle is due for a total overhaul; merely changing the driver will not address its serious, recurrent problems.

What are some other symptoms that the current political machinery is not functioning as it ought to, or, as was fervently hoped for by one and all in the heady days of 1990?

Malaise: There is, of course, the well-known case of "tainted" types being inducted into the government and the embarrassment of the Supreme Court overturning its sacking of Rashtra Bank governor Dr Tilak Rawal and Koirala’s refusal to accept former Finance (now Defence) Minister Mahesh Acharya’s resignation.

There is also that the King has sought the Supreme Court’s advice on the controversial bill to amend the Citizenship Act, rammed through the Lower House by the ruling party, not to talk of the perennial squabbles within the Congress or the spectacle of one minister overturning the policy decisions of his predecessor.

Soldiers have been transformed into customs inspectors, the Army ordered about by CDOs, while India merrily fishes in the turbid political waters, with speculation rife about quid pro quos to bail Koirala out, even at the nation’s cost. It’s Armageddon now!