Vol. 2 :: No. 08 July, 2000 (Asadh-Shrawan)

Tourism

Growing Dependency Syndrome

By Navin Singh Khadka

If you need to gauge the nation’s dependency syndrome, scan through the official budget statement. The answer is there in front of you: Above 60 per cent of the annual budget comprises of foreign aid. The major chunk of that assistance is allocated as development expenditure. And so, development of tourism – the major forex earner in the country – is no exception.

No matter how much the private sector thumps its chest claiming that it is in the tourism driving-seat, the travel trade too is gripped by the national epidemic: the growing dependency syndrome.

True that private operators are running the show in travel business – as far as opening the shops and selling the products and services are concerned. But, that is not all tourism is about. Especially, when new destinations are emerging in the region posing real threat for Nepal as a touristic-destination.

With the track record of having developed on its own in the last five decades, tourism now badly needs a national plan to steer its future course. And this exactly is where the travel industry’s growing dependency syndrome is evident. Of course, the Ninth five-year Plan does spell few things about tourism development.

But, that has not been able to set a sound footing. Otherwise, why almost all tourism related policies are trickling one after another from different donor agencies and international non-government organizations? Sample these: United Nations Development Program and SNV (Netherlands’s Development Organization) are working on a rural tourism project.

With the goal to reduce poverty in the rural population, the policy is soon reaching the official desk before it is implemented. The project will be on in nearly half a dozen different villages throughout the kingdom.

UNDP was the same organization that introduced the Quality Tourism Project back in 1994 and experimented the program in two villages in the Langtang National Park. Under the same banner, it tried to establish a partnership between the government and the private sector. As a result, came the Nepal Tourism Board – presently focussing on promoting Nepal as a destination.

Similar background is pegged with the establishment of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN). Senior politicians, holding responsible posts then, admit that the government had to kowtow to the donor’s demand to form the authority. What they point at is the Asian Development Bank’s second phase loan conditionalities for tourism infrastructure development as the catalyst for catapulting CAAN into the fore.

And now, more than four international non-government organizations are involved in drafting tourism policies for the different protected areas in the country. Ironically enough, none of the 15 conservation areas across the kingdom have had any tourism policies for all these years. It has been almost three decades since the senior-most protected area – Royal Chitwan National Park – came into being, and it still does not have any tourism policy designed for it.

That is one clear reason why the national park – with the successful conservation story of one-horned rhinos – is smeared with tourism-induced blotches today. Because there was never a clear-cut policy, tourism operators thronged the eastern part of the park and meddled with the wildlife there degrading the environment.

Now that the policies are being made, the draft will surely reach the concerned agencies and will get through them. They may also materialize in the sites -–if they are ever implemented.

These plans and programs may well become pivotal to develop the national tourism. Hats off to the foreign agencies offering crucial helping hands for tourism development. But then, if all gets done by others, what is the role of the government or even the private sector? Here in lies the knotty issue.

Jimmy Roberts taught Nepal what trekking is. So were other foreigners to introduce other tourism products – mountaineering, rafting, wildlife safari, and you name it. All that the national tourism did was blindly follow the items demonstrated. That is why you see an uncanny development of tourism in Nepal.

First, it was the foreign tourists who came here and built the ‘foundation’. Then only, after more than three decades, tourism entrepreneurs started talking about domestic tourism. Whereas, most of the touristic destinations around the world have developed the other way round.

Such an unnatural growth explains what ails Nepal’s travel industry. Going by the past records and what is happening now, policymakers in the country are indeed having a relaxed time. Someone else prepared a policy-document, and all they have to do is endorse it. But how long is that going to work?

Not for ever. Here is a fitting example: In protected areas like Chitwan and Bardiya, UNDP’s Park and People Project is coming to an end. And clouds of confusions are already hovering above the parks’ authorities and others concerned. Park authorities in Bardiya, for instance, don’t even know what to do with the credit money the project had provided to the people in the park’s buffer zone.

Under its usual program, the project lends the local communities credit amount to begin an enterprise and the locals are supposed to pay back the amount after certain time.

Similarly, the local lodges and restaurant is Shyabrubesi and Thulo Shyabrubesi in Langtang National Park are back to square one after UNDP’s Quality Tourism Project closed down some two years ago.

With abundant examples like these, is it not high time for the officialdom and the private sector to take the baton of the tourism development campaign? Of course, with a national policy as the spearhead, foreign assistance for different projects can always be subject to consideration.

But when the national tourism industry still gropes in the dark without a national vision, these are a few examples what happens: the stinking and health hazardous uncollected heaps of garbage remain in almost every crossroads in the capital – the gateway for more than 90 percent of inbound tourists; Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation, the national airline, that brings in about 40 percent of inbound tourists, continues to be in shambles.

Less Tourists

Whether one calls it alarming or not, the tourist arrival figures for the first six months of the year 2000 show how shaky is the foundation on which Nepal’s tourism industry stands.

Suspension of flights of Indian Airlines (IA) to Nepal for about six months, hit the Nepal’s tourism industry a heavy blow. But how much? The answer: 11% during the first quarter of the year and over 16% in the second. Overall, Nepal suffered a 14% decline in total tourist arrival in the year 2000 as compared to the same period last year. While some 196,505 tourists arrived in Nepal by air in 1999 between January 1 and June 30, the number dropped to 168,811 in 2000.

The drop is attributed to the suspension of IA flights to Nepal beginning the last week of 1999 after a plane of the airline was hijacked on its flight back to New Delhi from Kathmandu. The correlation between the IA flight suspension and lower number of tourist arrival seems valid when one looks at the fact that the decline in tourists during the period is 36.82% among Indians while the number of third country tourists has remained at almost the same level of the previous year. Had IA continued flying, the number of third country tourists might have been much more given the fact that a large number of them come to Nepal after first visiting India under the same package.

Now with IA flight resumed, the rest of the period of the year is expected to experience at least similar level of tourists arrival as in the previous year. The data provided by Nepal Tourism Board, collecting them from the Immigration office at Tribhuban International Airport (TIA) also suggest that the Indian people did not believe in the big hue and cry created by Indian authorities, Indian media and IA management about security situation in Nepal and TIA. A significant number of Indians (48,000) flew into Nepal during the period between the hijacking and now. Had another airline, say RNAC, been able to replace the IA flights, the number of visitors would not have dropped, it can be concluded.

Tourist Arrival

(By air only)

Source: Nepal Tourism Board

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