Delivery Matters To The People

As the Dashain festival is drawing closer, city denizens must be looking forward to travelling to their home districts to celebrate the occasion. A larger percentage of the people residing in the Kathmandu Valley exit the capital city for a few momentous days during the festival, which is observed for almost a fortnight.  However, the road conditions are so treacherous that travelling along the highways and feeder roads is risky and prone to accidents. There have been claims that significant improvements have been made in road connectivity, and progress in the completion of the road projects has gained significant momentum. Though there are some truths in this official pronouncement, ground reality speaks otherwise. 

The rehabilitation of the Butwal-Narayanghat section of the East-West Highway provides a strategic passage to the western and eastern parts of Nepal, which is a point in the case. While the road is yet to be fully completed, the Daunne segment of the road remains a hazardous terrain due to the slowed pace of reconstruction. The road is blocked due to landslides, and vehicles are halted due to slippery conditions even during low precipitation. The concerned agency of the government is therefore under an obligation to require the concerned agencies to work day in and day out to complete the road so that travellers will not face any difficulties touring during the Dashain festival. 

People’s aspirations 

The authorities need to deliver and cater to the needs and aspirations of the people, whether they are concerned with road infrastructure and connectivity or other basic supplies. Concerned authorities and senior political leaders have committed time and again to work towards achieving transformative changes in the governance and infrastructure development of the country. However, to act and deliver results, there needs to be a shift in the working patterns and style of the coalition government. The party leaders should shun aggrandising their partisan turf and interests. Suppose leaders continue to rouse their supporters and prioritise their own interests. In that case, the coalition government will become lost in a maze of tall promises and rhetoric without any tangible results to its credit. 

When a government makes tall promises and fails to deliver on the basic aspirations of its people, popular disappointments grow and manifest into outbursts. To demonstrate evidence of its seriousness and efficacy, the government should first target accelerating the process of completing the major roads, including those linking the capital city with the rest of the country, as their decrepit conditions are making communication and transportation difficult for ordinary people.  The federal reorganisation of the state was done to ensure participatory governance and development so that the people in the far-flung and remote areas of the country could own up and align with the process of democracy building. 

But this transformative promise of federal governance presents challenges. Reports and studies indicate that not only at the federal level, political functionaries and officials at the sub-national level have gone overboard to nurse their own vested interests. When one scans through the news media headlines, one can come across several instances that indicate how villages and rural hinterlands in the far-off districts have been allowed to suffer and languish in deprivation due to the highhandedness and parochial interests of the dominant local politicians who work in collusion with contractors and corrupt bureaucrats.

In some instances, local politicians from ward chairmen to mayors have been involved in unleashing what is called a dozer-led track-building boom. This dozer-led road construction boom has been executed by cutting into steep, fragile hillsides haphazardly without any attention to planning and ecological considerations. The construction is mostly carried out without any design of proper drainage, reckless and mindless destruction of a vast swathe of green vegetation. This has been responsible for the landslides and mudflows wreaking havoc during the ongoing rainy season. 

Such road construction is a quick and easy practice that mostly benefits contractors, unscrupulous government officials, and politicians. It damages local landscapes and ecosystems across Nepal, including major highways. Similar practices of dozer assault on the fragile hill ecosystem, where locally elected politicians mastermind and lead the dozer-based road construction to cut the hill slopes haphazardly, exist almost in every district of the country. 

Obligation

It is alleged that local politicians work in collusion with local contractors and technical personnel to foil any attempt to scrutinise the action. Local communities are neither consulted nor allowed access to information regarding the project's operation.  The concerned authorities should be aware of the pitfalls and shortcomings seen in the performance across all levels of the government through recourse to effective correction measures. Thus, the problems to confront and tackle are not only at the federal level but also at the subnational level. 

It is the obligation of the administration to infuse new hope and inspiration among people who are now feeling unattended and neglected by the politicians who tend to make tall promises but fail to deliver. As mentioned at the outset, the present administration should take cognisance of the immediate needs of the people and accelerate the pace of completing the road projects, among others, that have inconvenienced and put the lives of commuters in jeopardy.

(The author is presently associated with Policy Research Institute (PRI) as a senior research fellow.  rijalmukti@gmail.com)