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The Forthcoming Tenth Plan
Emphasising Local Participation

By Uttam Maharjan

ECONOMIC development is essential to uplift the living standard of people. For this, various ramifications of an economy need improvement. Planned development strategies can supply inputs to bring about improvement in such sectors as agriculture, industry, tourism, hydropower and education.

Nepal has embarked upon planned economic development since 2013 BS, when the first five-year plan was started. The current Ninth Plan is at its last leg. And the Tenth Plan is commencing from next fiscal year (2059-60).

In Nepal, many development infrastructures have been built and development models tried over the last 45 years. But there still exists a multitude of problems such as poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, lack of clean drinking water and unsystematic sanitation.

The government has initiated several programme for improving the lot of people but these programmes have not been fully successful. As a result, we are still facing such problems as low savings, low capital formation, a widening budget deficit, an economic imbalance and heavy dependence on donors for development projects.

Development planners in Nepal tend to repeat plans, programmes and policies from the previous ones. In most cases, the targets set in one plan cannot be achieved and hence are carried forward to the next plan. However, it would not be judicious to drop a target simply because it could not be achieved in the previous plan. Rather, the reasons for failing to achieve the target should be identified and a new, different approach adopted to meet it in the next plan.

A review of the previous plans shows that although the goals set were excellent, the implementation aspects was very poor. As such, prominence should be accorded to implementation and follow-up aspects to make any plan successful.

It is important to appraise the sector where investments are to be made. It is found that investments have been made in many unproductive sectors, thus draining productive sectors of much-needed investments. So it would be prudent to divert investments from unproductive to more productive sectors.

Now the time has come to evaluate the targets met in the previous plans, the factors responsible for leading to their accomplishment, the bottlenecks encountered in the course of meeting them and so on. Likewise, on the part of the targets that could not be met, the factors responsible for hindering their accomplishment should be identified and analysed. Such an appraisal with corrective measures would provide the forthcoming plan with useful inputs on the basis of which necessary strategies may be formulated.

Development is a continous process which is made possible by the contributions of people from all walks of life. In fact, it is imperative to pool resources together and harness them with the help of human skills and technology. The principles of economies dictate that limited resources should be utilised to produce maximum benefit for people. Similarly, Benthamism or utilitarianisms postulates maximum happiness for a maximum number of people. To ensure that the general public get maximum benefit of development, economic development should be accelerated. For this, cooperation from all sectors is a sine qua non.

Local participation in development activities is helpful in identifying common needs of people and formulating strategies accordingly. After all, the prime aim of any development plan would be to uplift the economic status of common people. That is why, measures need to be taken to enlist maximum participation of local-level communities in formulating and implementing various plans and programmes. This will help strengthen local bodies. This is also one of the hallmarks of decentralisation.

It is believed that the main goal of the forthcoming plan will be to alleviate poverty by creating employing opportunities and initiating income generation programmes. But poverty alleviation is not an easy proposition as shown by the current Ninth Plan which has aimed at reducing poverty to 32 per cent but it has remained at 38 per cent. This clearly shows that the goal of poverty alleviation is unlikely to be achieved by the end of the current plan.

As mentioned above, there are several ramifications of the economy that need to be simultaneously improved so as to bring about economic development to a desired extent.

Agriculture is the mainstay of our economy. But for lack of modern technology, facilities like irrigation, improved inputs, markets and competitive skills, the agricultural sector has not improved as expected. The importance of agriculture in an agrarian country like ours is very overriding. The development of this sector could lead to the development of others sectors also.

Similarly, the industrial sector is not looking up nowadays. Tourism industry, which is a big spinner of foreign exchange, is now passing through a bad patch for domestic and international reasons.

The skills of local people have remained untapped for lack of training and employment opportunities. These skills, if tapped properly, could contribute to the development of small-scale industries. Attention should, therefore, be paid to developing local appropriate technology in the forthcoming plan.

Some of the targets of the forthcoming plan will be to reduce poverty to 30 per cent from 38 per cent, to reduce the population growth rate to 2 per cent from 2.4 per cent and maintain the economic growth rate at 6-6-5 per cent.

As the main goal of the plan will be to alleviate poverty and eliminate unemployment and semi-employment problems by strengthening the base of economic development, it is imperative that the plan be formulated in a realistic perspective with special emphasis on monitoring/follow-up and implementation aspects. For this, a strong political commitment is indispensable. It may be hoped that the forthcoming plan will contribute to bringing about overall development of the country by making remarkable improvement in the living standard of the general people and contributing to social justice on the basis of the concept of the welfare state.

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