Foreign Aid & Development Programme
An Overview

By Uttam Maharjan

FOR a developing country like Nepal, economic development is a prerequisite for raising the standard of living of its people. But economic development is not so easy. It has many ramifications which should act synergistically to produce a coherent result. Such ramification include infrastructural development, health, education, sanitation, communications, transportation and so on.

Poor

Nepal is poor in mobilising internal resources for development programmes. So it is bound to depend on external aid and assistance.

The country has been receiving foreign aid since 1951 A.D. when she received foreign aid from the USA by reaching a 4-point development cooperation agreement. In the same year, the country also received foreign aid from India for the construction of roads and airports. Thereafter, the country reached similar agreements with China, the erstwhile USSR, Germany, Canada and Australia. The country also reached capital loan assistance agreements with India and the USA in 1952 A.D. and 1955 A.D. respectively.

Since 2013 B.S., when the first five-year plan was launched, the country has been receiving foreign aid on an institutional basis. After the establishment of the Nepal Development Forum in 2032 B.S., the inflow of foreign aid has witnessed a constant rise. Now the network of foreign aid has grown to encompass over 24 donor countries, and 19 bilateral and 23 multilateral agencies.

Foreign aid has a crucial role to play in the economic development of the country. In fact, some positive advances have been observed in industry, hydropower, communications, education, health and other fields.

It is an irony that despite the steady inflow of foreign aid for the last five decades, there have not been any significant changes in the economic status of the country. At the present exchange rates, the country has received around 350 billion rupees in foreign aid. Yet, the Nepalese people are now among the poorest in the world as evidenced by the per capita income of just USD 200, which is one of the lowest in the world. This shows that foreign aid has not been used in a proper and transparent manner.

Actually speaking, foreign aid has both good and bad aspects, good in the sense that it acts as a catalyst to accelerate development and bad in the sense that it gives rise to dependency at the cost of internal resources mobilisation, thus leading to laziness on the part of people despite their ingenuity.

Donor countries and agencies that purvey foreign aid have a penchant for imposing their own conditionalities on recipient countries. They want the projects to run at their own discretion. On the other hand, recipient countries cannot help but sign on the dotted line. In our context, foreign aid has
also been found to be used for procuring sophisticated equipment and vehicles.

As donor countries/agencies bring along with them their own consultants and technicians, a huge chunk of the aid money has to be paid as professional or consultancy fees. To add the last straw to the deplorable situation, corruption is always there to raise its ugly head, so much so that most of the foreign aid goes down the drain.

Other factors responsible for the underutilisation of foreign aid in the country are weak policy and implementation, inadequate attention to ownership, frequent change of project managers, lack of resource mobilisation and so on.

Foreign aid is made avialable in the form of either grants or loans. Till 1983/84 A.D. the portion of grants was heavier than that of loans. The trend has since been reversed. For example, the current budget (2057/2058) is financed by 35 foreign aid, which bifurcates into 13 per cent grants and 22 loans.

Heavy dependency on foreign aid, especially in the form of loans, may prove fatal in the long run. On the one hand, it gives rise to the dependency syndrome, while on the other it detracts from zest for making optimal use of internal resources, thus leaving them untapped.

The meeting of the Nepal Development Forum held in Paris in April this year proved substantial. At the meeting, the donor countries were convinced of the country’s reform packages regarding institutional and policy reforms, foreign aid utilisation, economic management improvement, revenue increases, civil service effectiveness and so on. The donor countries also pledged themselves to give more aid to the country provided there was progress in institutional and policy reforms and good use was made of aid money.

As foreign debt is growing year after year, a time has come that foreign aid should be gradually decreased. Just receiving a huge chunk of foreign aid cannot always contribute to economic development to a desired extent. After all, foreign aid is not a panacea. A time will come soon when a huge chunk of the budget will have to be earmarked for debt servicing. And there will be less funds available for development projects.

The Ninth Plan has envisioned a gradual reduction in foreign aid. The plan has provided for development expendi-tures on the strength of 33.3 per cent revenue, 58.8 per cent foreign aid and 7.9 per cent internal loans. Of these components, the foreign aid includes 17.2 per cent grants and 41.6 per cent loans.

Similarly, the current budget is supported by grants worth Rs. 11.842 million and loans worth Rs. 19,793 million. The budget has provided for foreign aid in a new perspective.

The country has not had any clear-out foreign aid policy, while donor countries have their own policies. After five decades of depending on foreign aid for development programmes, it has been finally realised that all the aid money has not been fully utilised. So there is ample room to suspect that there could have been some aberrations and anomalies in the use of the aid money.

New Draft

To overcome these shortcomings the government announced a new draft foreign aid policy in a July this year. The broad thrust of the policy would be utilising foreign aid in producing native skilled manpower for optimally harnessing indigenous resources and gradually reducing foreign aid. However, the success of the upcoming foreign policy, for that matter any other policy, lies, in its implementation. So long as the implementation phase is not strong, nothing will come out of the policy, no matter however excellent it may be.

Psychology & Its Related Problems

By Rajesh Kumar Jha

PSYCHOLOGY is a branch of science in which we study about the behaviour of the living organism. There are two main aspects of behaviour —normal and abnormal. If we were to examine the life record of thousands of individuals taken at random from the general population, we would find a common pattern running through the great majority. In their school years they were from slow to good student. As an adult they entered a variety of skilled and unskilled occupation, exhibited satisfactory work capacity and managed to earn adequate incomes, they were capable of establishing satisfactory relationship with other people and their emotional and social reactions were essentially adequate and appropriate. They were essentially law-abiding citizens who respected and adhered to the rules and conventions of their culture. In personality traits, naturally they differed from one another, but none were exceptionally excitable, seclusive, depressed, suspicious, dynamic, impressive or otherwise very outstanding. These commonplace men and women who exhibited at least ordinary competence in self-management and got along reasonably well with themselves and their associates constitute the normal or average group.

Deviation

On the other hand the world abnormal literally means "away from the normal." It implies deviation from some clearly defined norm. Included in this abnormal group would be individuals marked by limited intelligence, emotional instability, personality disorganisation and character defects, who for the most part, led wretched personal lives and were social misfits or liabilities. The abnormal behaviours are usually classified into four categories Psychotic, Psychoneurotic, mentally defective and antisocial.

Psychoneurotic: Typical mental symptoms are anxiety, feeling of inner tension, restlessness, idea of inadequacy, inability to concentrate, loss of memory, absurb fear and obsessions. Physical symptom, which are essentially reper-cussions of internal emotional dis-turbances, include headaches, upsets stomach, excessive fatigue and loss of sensory and motor functions. Psychoneuroses are relatively mild personality disorders that distress and inconvenience the patient but do not disrupt its social adjustment or interfere with his everyday activities to the point of necessitating supervision or compulsory commitment to a mental hospital.

When under great emotional stress, a normal person who experiences a severe emotional shock may be speeches or paralysed for a few minutes. He may faint, feel week or complain of irregular heart action or neusia. Soon however he regains control of himself and his symptom disappear. Following a similar or milder emotional shock. Psycho-neurotic may suffer for month from loss of voice, Paralysis, general exhaustion, cardiac instability or gastric upset. Faced with failure, a normal individual may be beset with temporary anxiety and feeling of inferiority, but a psychoneurotic may retain this attitude in exaggerated form all his life.

Psychoses: Psychoses are severe mental disorders that tend to shatter the integration of the personality and disrupt the individual’s social relationships. The behaviour of the psychotic is too bizarre, unreasonable, and inappropriate to be understood by a normal person. Psycho-tic individuals are so unbalanced mentally that they are not legally responsible for their actions. In the eyes of the law, they are insane. In psychoses, normal inhibition and cultural restraints are severed, and the patient indulges his whims and phantasies unchecked by rules of logic, common sense, or social pressure. The wish is father to the thought, and thought is omnipotent. A female patient claimed that she gave birth to a thousand babies a day.

In their emotional reactions they show the same disregarded for reality. Without any apparent cause, they become violently excited, depressed, or irritable. There is no logical relation between the motivating situation and the emotional responses. Sad news from home may evoke laughter, good news, tears, or either may have no effect. Usually, the patient is confused, bewildered, and disoriented. The pyschotic lives not in the world of reality but in his own private world. He is divorced from his associates, and the rules, customs, and happenings of the real world have no meaning or significance for him.

Mental deficiency: Mental deficiency is a general category which includes a variety of individuals who, become of subnormal or retarded mental development, are unable as children to profit from regular school instruction and as adults are incapable of adequate self-management or self support. These individuals are also classified as aments or feeble-minded. The dullest of the mental defectives never learn to walk, talk or feed them-selves. In adaptability to life situation they show less intelligence than animals, not even knowing enough to come in & out of the rain. They would soon parish if they were not protected and cared for by others. Even as adults, they must be treated as helpless infants.

Antisocial personalities: Included in this categories are two overlapping but more or less independent group that share a common propensity for antisocial behaviour. One group made up of convicted law violators, and the other consists of individuals with psychopathic perso-nalities.

Depending on their age, law violators are classified from a legal point of view as delinquents or criminals. Small proportions of criminals are mentally defective, but the great majority possesses average intelligence and some have superior mental ability. All personality types are found in the criminal group. Many first offenders that are convicted of accidental or culturally tolerate offenses, for example traffic violations and bootlegging, have essen-tially normal personality.

Psychopathic

Other criminals, in addition to being lawbreakers, suffer from psychoreuroses or psychoses. Among habitual criminals especially, a peculiar personality termed a psychopathic personality is frequently found. Although most individuals with psychopathic personality are potential criminals, it is desirable to consider them as a separate group. Many of them manage to evade the law and hence are
not strictly speaking, criminals, many criminals may not have psychopathic personalities.

Violence Against Women Makes Asia Sit Up

By Henrylito D. Tacio

AT LEAST, one woman in every three has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, in Asia and elsewhere. Most often, the abuser is a member of her own family. Today, violence against women is con-sidered "a public health priority" and a human rights concern."

"Women can experience physical or mental abuse throughout their lifecycle: in infancy, childhood and/or adolescence, or during adulthood or older age," deplores the Geneva-based World Health Organisation (WHO) in a recent report.

Here are findings from the UN health agency report.

Population-based studies report between 12 and 25 per cent of women have experienced attempted or completed forced sex by an intimate partner or ex-partner at some time in their lives.

Interpersonal violence was the 10th leading cause of death for women 15-44 years of age in 1998.

Forced prostitution, trafficking for sex and sex tourism appear to be growing. Existing data and statistical sources on trafficking of women and children estimated 500,000 women entering the European Union in 1995.

In every country where reliable, large-scale studies have been conducted, results indicate that ‘between 10 to 50 per cent of women report they have been physically abused by an intimate partner in their lifetime," according to WHO.

These are all human rights concern. But violence against women continues to exist. One reason for this, according to Centre for Health and Gender Equality (CHANGE), is that many cultures hold that men have the right to control their wives’ behaviour. Women who challenge this right may be punished.

CHANGE is a research and advocacy organisation that seeks to integrate concern for gender equality and social justice into international health policy and practice. It recently published a comprehensive report on the subject entitled Ending Violence Against Women.

In Asian countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, and Papua New Guinea, violence is frequently viewed as "physical chas-tisement"— the husband’s right to "correct" an erring wife.

Worldwide, studies identify a consistent list of events that are said to "trigger" violence. These include: disobeying her husband, talking back, not having food ready on time, failing to care adequately for the children or home, questioning him about money or girlfriends, going somewhere without his permission, refusing him sex, or expressing suspicious of infidelity.

Women’s response to the abuse of their husbands are similar: fear of retribution, lack of other means of economic support, concern for the children, emotional depen-dence, lack of support from family and friends, and an abiding hope that "he will change."

In many parts of the world, marriage is interpreted as ‘granting men the right to unconditional sexual access to their wives" and "the power to enforce this access through force if necessary."

"What else have I married you for?" the husband asked an Indian wife after she avoided sex with him. As a result, the woman was battered.

This scenario is also true in the Philippines. In the Western Visayas, 43 per cent of the married women surveyed said they were afraid to refuse their husband’s sexual advances.

The UN health agency claims violence against impairs their physical and mental health. Abused women, it points out, are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, psycho-somatic symptoms, eating problems, and sexual dysfunctions.

The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women defines violence against women: "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public in private life."

"Violence against women is not just a case of the AIDs epidemic," points out Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the joint UN program on HIV/AIDS. "It can also be a consequence of it."

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