Sustainable Development
Some Essential Conditions

By Khilendra Basnyat

DEVELOPMENT is meant for the welfare of people. Raising living standard and bringing about improvement in education, health and equality of opportunities are essential ingredients of economic development. Apart from these, ensuring political and civil rights is a broad development goal.

Perception

In fact, development cannot be perceived in isolation. It is a total plan of action covering different aspects such as social, economic, cultural, political and environmental. Therefore, development should be looked at in terms of total development rather than separate arena.

Likewise, balanced development is the ultimate goal of every nation or egalitarian society. The fruits of development should be equally distributed in all parts of the nation. Without balanced development, an egalitarian society, which is the hallmark of development, cannot achieve its goal.

Human is the one of the essential components of national development. Without competent manpower development in any sector is virtually impossible.

Despite continuing endeavours being made for our overall national development over the years, the scenario is yet to be encouraged. The planned development has brought a great agenda for development. However, the people’s aspirations have only been partially fulfilled. Their desires have soared specially after the restoration of the multi-party system a decade ago.

Economists, politico-economists and intellectuals are of the opinion that poverty and unemployment, corruption and lack of effective management and the gap between economic objectives and policies are the factors hindering the nation’s development.

Foreign agencies have been pouring money for various kinds of development. If the foreign assistance is stopped, the development process thus generated dies out. It is obvious that there are many rural water supply projects and others which have become defunct not very long after they are implemented.

Economic growth is an essential means for enabling development in any sector. However economic growth in itself is a highly imperfected proxy for progress. It has been recognised that measures of educational opportunities, infant mortality and nutritional status are complements of Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product.

Our economy has been rather stagnant over the last few decades. Corruption has been rampant and poverty widespread. The shortcomings of our development strategy and national policy need serious thought and introspection.

In our old strategy, there was the absence of a link between priorities and policies. Although priorities were clear, the instruments selected to achieve these priorities failed to deliver people’s needs.

In the present context there are three gaps that need to be balanced or minimised – income and expenditure, expenditure and export and saving and investment.

The pattern of development and the strategy of socio-economic relation should be planned in such a manner that they result in not only of increase in national income and employment but also in great equality in income and wealth. Decision regarding production, distribution, consumption, investment and in fact all important socio-economic relationships must be made by agencies set up for social purpose.

For the development of our country, sound politics, quality design of the development programmes, effective implementation and rigorous process of monitoring and evaluation are needed. In order to rid the nation of the economic crisis it is presently facing and achieve a high economic growth rate, the
nation should develop a culture of consensus.

The weak performance of national growth is the outcome of some structural problems, which not only affects the domestic investment but also hinders integration of the domestic economy into the globalisation process.

Although the structural adjustment programme was started in 1995, there have not been any sustained and stringent improvement in our country. Inherent weak fiscal consolidation and new problems in the banking sector have all been responsible for hampering the growth process.

Despite the fact that sound growth is essential to sustain the economy, growth alone does not guarantee equity and social justice. Therefore, our development demands growth with equity.

In fact, economic and non-economic factors play a vital role while pursuing development policies. Principles of economy alone do not function. Since every society has its own speciality and features, so our development strategy should be adopted in accordance with national psyche.

Sustainable development is the development that lasts for a long time. Those who enjoy the fruits of economic development today many be making future generation worse off by excessively degrading the earth’s resources and polluting the earth’s environment.

The fact that environmental damage hurts people today and in future provides additional grounds for rethinking our measurement progress. It raises special concerns because unlike education, health, nutrition and life expectancy, which need to be improved by economic growth, suffering from the damage may be different from those enjoying the benefits or growth. They may be today’s poor, they may be future generation, who inherit a degraded environment. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to assess the costs to human welfare of environment.

Since Nepal’s vision of development is economic sustainability, the Nepalese planners and development strategists including politicians, must learn to acknowledge the financial, technical and strategic mistakes of the past that have jeopardised the investment made by the nation. It is because the elements of sustainability, in case the vision is clear, lie in quick understanding and the ability to rectify mistakes.

Approach

For sustainable development, the financial institutions, industry and trade should target the poor and back up the government’s poverty alleviation programmes. What is more, a cautious approach has to be taken especially in the banking sector programme projects in order to assist in these programmes.

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