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Kathmandu Wednesday February 28, 2001 Falgun 17, 2057.
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Attacking poverty
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has come up with a new initiative called
country strategy for poverty reduction to grapple with the country’s abysmal state of
poverty. The objective of this new initiative seems to have been directed towards
assisting the poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP). The PRSP, an interim report
prepared by the government, is aimed at reducing poverty, where the poor have received a
raw deal at the hands of planners. Here, the ADB may appear being interventionist in its
approach, but it was absolutely necessary, if only to allay donor anxiety. What appears is
that the ADB’s stand is not very different from that of the government’s. In
fact, the ADB’s "overarching concern" has come since successive governments
failed to make any positive impact on the life of those rural poor living in abject
poverty. The rising poverty, inflation and famine, and the manner in which the foreign
assistance has been utilized show that not only the expectations of international
financial institutions, that provide development assistance to this country, but also of
the people have been crushed
Three decades ago, the Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) had in a report pointed out
that 33 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line. The report of the World
Bank and Central Bureau of Statistics raised this figure to 42 per cent in 1997. This
certainly indicates that the rate of poverty has increased despite the three- decade- long
efforts to alleviate poverty. It is true that only eight per cent of the total population
have access to drinking water and fifty per cent of the children remain out of the
schools. The school drop out rate is more than fifty per cent and half of the children are
born underweight. This fact points out that the country is caught in the vicious circle of
poverty, and the magnitude of the task to eradicate it has called for well-planned
distribution of resources.
Earlier, the World Bank withdrew the funding of three projects to introduce a
similar development plan called the country assistance strategy. The stress was to
maintain "transparency" to facilitate economic growth and at the same time to
reduce poverty, opposing the previous policy of concealing the gross misutilisation of
funds. This explains why every five-year-plan introduced since the mid-1950s, with an aim
of eradicating poverty, has failed to bring development resources and beneficiaries
closer. This also indicates how planners, implementators and others involved in poverty
alleviation projects benefited themselves. Considering the situation of poverty, the scope
and area has been widened, and it is not limited itself to strategies only. The fact is
that the government has to play not only a role in all spheres of economic activity but it
also has to utilize the scarce resources of the economy in such a way that the maximum
benefit can be obtained at the minimum cost.
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