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Kathmandu Saturday March 24, 2001 Chaitra 11, 2057.
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Holiday talk
The two-day weekend scheme is
a classic example of how not to make right administrative decisions. Since the very
beginning, public holidays for two consecutive days have been predicted to be a fiasco.
But it amounted to even more than that. Surprisingly, the government took nearly two years
to admit its mistake and to make some revisions. Introduced in 1999 on an
"experimental basis", Saturdays and Sundays were declared holidays in Kathmandu
Valley. But it failed to evoke warm response from most employees and entrepreneurs. For
some, it was an unexpected bonanza and for others, another unwanted leisure. Labour
problems galore, the employees were not vociferously pressing in for that extra holiday.
But out of the blue, it came.
Even the revised scheme is
not free from flaws. The government has decided to run only the offices and institutions
of essential services from Sunday to Friday, effective from next month. The exclusion of
civil service offices from the domain of this directive is shocking and simply
unjustifiable. The civil service is notorious for bureaucratic bungling, red-tape and
corruption. And two-day holidays will only help make matters worse. In the last two years,
it has been seen and felt that the civil service has been far from what it had been hoped.
Inefficient and incompetent as ever, to say the least. The holidays would, we were led to
believe, help reduce fuel consumption, give some relief to this polluted and
traffic-choked Valley and ensure smooth and efficient services. But the promise proved to
be too tall talk. Mondays were as mad as ever, and the rest of the weekdays could easily
be imagined. It is an open secret that white collar civil servants turned up only after
ten though the office hours started from nine in the morning, and disappeared hours before
the clock struck five. Rather than boosting the morale of the employees, it became an
incentive for poor attendance and poor work. Under such circumstances, giving weekend
holidays for two days is to push the country’s administrative system into chaos and
confusion, and to waste the taxpayers’ money. Moreover, it will be an open and
painful insult to the public. Also, there is no uniformity in the policy. Since it is
confined to the Valley and to certain essential services, the coordination between and
among administrative agencies, scattered across the country, will certainly break down.
This makes the new policy nothing but a total farce. And as usual, the public will
continue to suffer due to this piecemeal and whimsical policy.
Perhaps, Nepal tops the list of
countries' for having the largest number of public holidays, not to mention the
uncountable days off due to sudden bandhs and strikes. More unasked for holidays will in
no way be an incentive for workers, with other things still lurching between bad and
worse. It is high time the government trimmed the bulging list of holidays more
generously. Or has its better sense taken a holiday for a long hibernation?
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