Nepal's Dilemma

By Kalinga Seneviratne

Nepal is a classic case of neoliberal economic policies playing havoc with the social fabric of a poor developing country, says the Nepali delegation to the WSF, arguing that it is only worsening the vicious circle that is manifest in the conflict between the government and a Maoist group.

The Nepali activists are appealing to the global social movement for assistance in lobbying the neoliberal international financial institutions not for more money, but to leave Nepal alone.

They point out that 40 percent of Nepal's income is spent on debt service alone, which contributes to the fact that the majority of the country's 24 million people live in extreme poverty.

The Nepal Social Forum (NSF) is distributing a brochure that lists many basic commodities and how many hours of paid labour (based on Nepal's per capita income of US$ 220 per year) is needed to purchase it.

A kilo of rice takes 3 hours and 21 minutes of work, a litre of milk 4 hours and 26 minutes, a kilo of sugar 4 hours and 52 minutes, a litre of cooking oil 10 hours and 4 minutes. And if you want a few luxuries of life - a colour TV would cost you 1,258 hours of labour. For a bicycle, you need to work 436 hours.

The World Bank, the IMF and the Asian Development Bank, through their loan requirements and conditions, have taken over almost all the decision-making processes, claims the NSF.

They have also undermined Nepal's democratic reforms in the past 12 years by forcing all political parties and lawmakers to continue to adopt the neoliberal policies that the activists claim have made the people more and more frustrated towards their elected leaders.

This has pushed ordinary people towards joining the communist-Maoist "peoples' war" since 1996 which has resulted in thousands of deaths, the NSF says.

The United States and the Indian governments have been arming and supporting the Nepali government to suppress this uprising using all possible means, causing people to lose many of their hard-fought democratic freedoms. Nepal is again seeing innocent civilians killed, disappearances, torture, kidnapping and other human rights violations, charge the activists.

NSF spokesman Arjun Kumar Karki told TerraViva that the solution to the Maoist conflict is not more weapons, but rather assistance in addressing the root causes of the conflict: the debt burden, failure of the structural adjustment, and other ill-conceived social and economic policies.

He pointed out that while Nepal's child labour problem has become an internationally known, civil society groups battling to stop the employment of children under inhumane conditions are handicapped by two things: these families may need the income to survive and the government does not have funds to provide these children with the best alternative, an education.

"The state must take responsibility. If it cannot send the children to school, it should at least help the families. But for this the state need funds" says Karki.

"The process of globalisation has added to the gravity of the child labour problem in Nepal," Karki states. "It should be an important issue for the global social movement."