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May 10, 2001
Introduction
Christian Barry (Editor, Ethics & International Affairs Journal):
We are very fortunate to host this meeting, co-sponsored
by the Environmental Values Project
and the Human Rights Initiative,
two ongoing programs that we have here at the Council. We are very fortunate to have Dipak Gyawali, who has been involved in the water sector in Nepal since 1979, initially
as a Government engineer, and since 1987, as an independent analyst.
With training in both engineering and resource economics, his research
focuses on the interface between technology and society, mainly
on issues of water and energy. He is the Director of the Nepal Water
Conservation Foundation and is also Pragya of the Royal Nepal Academy
of Science and Technology. He has asked me to mention that he is
the chair of the South Asian Regional Division of the Social Science
Research Council (SSRC), which brings him to New York.
I was initially puzzled when asked
to make this introduction because I was unfamiliar with much of
the literature on water, and governance related to water, and not
sure of its connection to human rights. But after reading some of
Dipak's work on water, I saw many interesting parallels, one of
which is that traditional human rights thinking has focused on the
idea of claims against the state, either to refrain from, or to
provide certain services. Failures in human rights have occurred
when the Government's action was poor or inadequate. Similarly,
Dipak has pointed out in his recent work, Water in Nepal
(Himal Books, Kathmandu 2001), that there is a danger in embracing
an institutional solipsism, focusing too narrowly on the existing
differentiation of roles, with the States seen as the locus of all
resources for providing goods and services. This distorts our attempts
to better realize human rights. By not focusing on institutional
arrangements and the broader framework of rules that give incentives
to individual organizations and firms, we risk, as he puts it, choking
like over-productive algae in a pond other forms of social institutional
life if we view the State as the provider of first and last resort.
With no further introduction, Dipak.
Remarks
Dipak Gyawali: Thank you. I
would like to begin with a story. In 1959, at the height of the
Cold War, a group of U.S. Senators and power company heads visited
the USSR, sponsored by the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs.
The visit produced a very interesting report on January 4, 1960,
"Relative Water and Power Resource Development in the USSR and the
USA." This is just before John Kennedy's inauguration, when the
great fear was the missile race, and that the USSR had overtaken
the U.S., or was about to overtake the U.S. in dam development.
The group visited what is now Volvograd, then Stalingrad. They were
told that 100,000 people had had to move to make way for this Stalingrad
dam. To the amazement of the U.S. delegation, the chief said that
"on a given day the people were told to move, and they moved." It
is simpler and faster in many ways, to drive a vast power program
under a totalitarian, monolithic communist system, than under an
American democratic system of governance.
Since 1960, the U.S. has been on a
massive learning curve, and by the time Blain Harden wrote A
River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia in 1996,
many things had happened. Now there is even a decommissioning of
several dams on the Columbia, which is regarded as one of the most
successful of developments, to allow for salmon and other benefits
to accrue. What we should really focus on is this disjunction, this
phase gap as we say in physics, that while the U.S. is on one track,
the rest of the world is only now catching up to what I call the
California Paradigm.
Every Government in the developing
world is engaged in constructing dams. Meanwhile, environmental
activists in the industrialized world are just as busy protesting
against this construction. Environmentalism in much of the South
has thus become a pejorative term. Take the example of the northern
Indian State of Bihar. Since India's independence from Britain fifty
years ago, there has been a massive program of constructing embankments
or side dams for flood protection. When you build an embankment
along a river to control floods, what is forgotten in our tropical
and semi-tropical parts of the world is that once the flood subsides,
the collected water drains back into the river. Embankments prevent
the river from spilling over, but not from seeping over and draining
back. As a result, there are villages in Bihar-which is a very fertile
part of India, with some seven thousand feet of rich alluvium -
where they used to get three crops a year with no fertilizer needed.
Now, they get one crop, if the monsoon fails. Because for nine months
of the year, there's too much water. For instance, the number of
people affected by this embankment, and the amount of land that
has gone out of production is several orders of magnitude more than
the most celebrated case that you hear about. Some villages are
left with only the elderly and children after the able bodied have
migrated to urban areas to work in factories because they cannot
sustain themselves in this most fertile part of the country.
The other example I would like to
bring is the well-known case of the Arun III hydroelectric project
in Nepal, a small project by any other standard, but quite a large
undertaking for Nepal. Arun III, a 200-megawatt project, was promoted
by the World Bank with gusto for ten years at a cost of US$20 million
for studies alone, which were ultimately so poorly constructed that
they did not stand up to scrutiny by activists. The World Bank had
to pull out in 1995, after ten years of spending US$20 million,
and preventing every other project from being studied.
This is not really about environmental
activism, even though there were environmental organizations involved
in this kind of work. It was purely bad economics by the World Bank,
and there were no major demonstrations, no street fights, unlike
most other major dam projects that you hear about all over the world.
It took only two years of intellectual activism to get the World
Bank to collapse and withdraw. To give you an idea of the economic
issue that was involved: A dam of that size in the Himalayas generally
takes about US$1,000 - $1,500/kilowatt to construct, whereas this
was being estimated at US$5,000/kilowatt. The Bank made a single
strategic mistake in never expecting a challenge from Nepal on intellectual
grounds. Several of us dissected pixel by pixel their computer program
that does the optimization study called WASP, and reconstructed
it to show that all of their assumptions were false. There were
also six alternative smaller projects, which are now nearing completion
after the World Bank pulled out, and producing a third more electricity
at half the cost in half of the time. You don't have to be an economic
wizard to figure out which is better. This is why the World Bank
had to withdraw after just two years of activism once multi-party
democracy was restored in Nepal in 1990.
The Bangladesh Flood Action Plan is
a second case, similar to Bihar, except that in Bihar there is no
real protest emerging. In the Bangladesh case, there was a strong
movement against the Flood Action Plan, a massive engineering project
to dike all of the country's rivers. Both the Ganges and the Brahmaputra
join there, and burst into thousands of streams, which annually
flood and are meant to flood. But if you embank all of these, not
only will you prevent water from draining back, you also allow silt
to accumulate within the embankment. These rivers come from the
Himalayas, where there is the highest rate of erosion, not because
farmers are cutting trees, but because of geotectonic processes.
The Himalayas on the average are rising and eroding at a rate of
approximately one millimeter per year, like building a sand mound
on a beach, the higher you build, the more keeps falling off. Strong
activism halted the project. I told my Bangladeshi friends, "you
really want to see what would have happened in Bangladesh if the
Flood Action Plan had gone ahead? Just go to Bihar and take a look
at how it has destroyed the politics, the social fabric, everything."
What I would like to draw from these
examples is the selective amnesia that seems to operate at this
larger social level. What is the filtering out of information, at
what time, who does the filtering, and if there is a filter that
chokes out certain types of information, who brings it back in?
There is also selective science going on. I'll give you one more
example.
In 1993 in Nepal, we had one of the
most massive cloud bursts, an inadequately studied phenomenon in
climatology. During a period of three days, there were 540 millimeters
of rain in twenty-four hours, or more precisely nine hours. When
you have half a meter - a foot and a half of rain - in nine hours,
there is really nothing you can do except to make sure that it drains
away as fast as possible. Nothing was saved, trees in the slopes
all came down together in one massive Armageddon. The Kulekhani
Reservoir in Nepal is so low now that we are going through eight
hours of low shedding every day because the water has dried up.
We had no rain for seven months last winter, and a similar winter
the year before. In this one dam, there was a dead water level,
that is the point at which all the dirt and silt accumulate to the
level of the tunnel which carries off the water. The dam cannot
be operated. The calculation was that it would take one hundred
years for this silt to reach dead water level - ten million cubic
meters of space. Five million cubic meters, half, came in
this one cloud burst. Almost half had already been destroyed previously,
and half was destroyed in this single event.
This study was done by Japanese consultants
followed by World Bank review missions, all of whom agreed that
it would take at least one hundred years. What happened? Selective
filtering out of information. As the same river debouches into the
plains of India, there is a barrage for irrigation which was designed
for a 8,000 maximum cubic meter per second flood level. There was
one statistical outlier in this whole list, which showed that there
was probably a 12,000 cubic meter per second flood. If you take
the larger number, your design of gates and flood structures are
bigger, and thus more expensive. The World Bank has only so much
money, so why complicate things. The 12,000 cubic meter per second
flood was rejected as an outlier, and it was designed for 8,000,
which operated fine until this 1993 event. Several people lost their
lives, villages were washed out, it was an unbelievable disaster
as the barrage came barreling down after the cloud burst in the
northern hills. There were three enormous tree trunks stuck on the
gantries, which means the river had gone right to the top. Not only
was this 8,000 cubic meter per second figure inaccurate, but the
12,000 figure would have also been wrong, because the actual flood
was 15,000. Again, why this selective filtering out of information?
What has happened here is that in
most developing countries, through no fault of the governments,
but because in the structures of development that we have put in
place - including the Breton Woods institution like the World Bank
- state and its bureaucracy are the vehicles of development. There
is also the area of critical civil society -the so-called "NGO movement."
And the state moves into that area and does the social civil society
work also. And the real civil society and real market get driven
underground, thus leaving an uncontested terrain in which the state
and its allies function. Most water resource development takes place
in this uncontested terrain, which is uncontested only up to a point,
because after a while, these underground markets - the real markets
-come back like a jack-in-the-box.
In terms of water science, the Government
takes on regulatory but not market science, which has an innovative
bent. This is where the issue of human rights comes in. Take the
case of Nepal. Before 1990, we had our absolute monarchy and in
April 1990 a multi-party parliamentary system or "democracy" was
restored. Before 1990, we had an uncontested terrain, and human
rights activism at this point was seen as restoring our political
rights to organize, vote, and fight elections on different grounds.
So human rights were synonymous with political rights. And all other
issues, including the issues of bad power development or energy
development, were seen as human rights issues because we had no
political rights. But after 1990, most of these human rights organizations
faded away or died, simply because "now that we have democracy,"
everything will be taken care of. What was forgotten was the first
law of democracy, that elected representatives do not listen to
reason. They are only able to feel the heat, which committed activism
alone can deliver. Thus, when you have no activism, there is no
heat, which means that politicians will not behave the way you think
they should. So the issue has become, now that we have democracy,
how do you return to the contestation that has been lost because
of apathy? Most of this contestation from voluntary science comes
only when a sense of danger is triggered. Human rights is the only
discourse that allows space for contestation, whether for a nascent
market driven underground, or a nascent underground civil society.
Human rights language emerges from an understanding of the charter
of human rights of the United Nations. But there is only a vague
understanding even among the elites who use this word, let alone
the villagers.
Human rights, then, gets translated
into a fight for rights that is modulated and modified to a particular
context -whether it be the right to land, to water, to not be evicted
from ancestral property. If you use the human rights angle, suddenly
you can internationalize the issue, and put pressure on government,
because there are all kinds of groups listening and saying, "Oh
wow, we'll do something about it." This is how human rights is now
re-entering the public contestation through groups who see choices
of technology that are not contested. Is it only intellectuals who
use these kinds of terms? Consider the situation, in much of the
developing world: outside the capital city, you will probably find
a literacy rate in the range of 30 percent, and even those who are
literate probably have no access to reading material. In such a
case, human rights would have to be, by the elites for the poor,
or what they perceive as representing the marginalized or the poor.
For instance, lack of development is seen by either the market or
the State as lack of human rights. If people are poor, what do they
expect? So we have to develop, and most big dam projects are justified
on that ground. Anybody questioning development is therefore anti-development,
and likewise anti-people. This will make human rights movements
much more difficult in the coming decades. It cannot be a simple
political rights issue, or a fight for resettlement or proper compensation.
But in most cases of technological choice, resettlement and compensation
are mitigatory and compensatory measures. Once you accept mitigation,
you have already accepted the main decision. So most successful
activists would reject that outright and begin from questioning
the very basis of the choice, and not so much the mitigating measures
of how the procedures can ensure adequate compensation. If human
rights issue were seen against an individual or particular group's
rights versus the State, it gets much more clumsy. And sometimes,
this yearning for neat and rigid structures allows the State to
establish a program, which for lack of a better word I would call
fascistic. We need order, we cannot have all this mess going around.
Therefore, we need a strong Joseph Stalin in each village.
Human rights and water development
issues may be redefined as not just versus the state, but also against
an uncontrolled market, because this is the next battle with globalization.
In most cases, the state has already relinquished its primary role
of development-it's become a handmaiden to the market. And the movement
of the market can be so ruthless, that it is bound to react with
groups, and communities may have other ideas. Unfortunately, much
of the reaction will come after the decisions have been taken. How
to do this a priori is going to be a major challenge for groups,
because how do you fight something that is just a mirage? Groups
working on human rights related to bad water development must make
sure that there is enough contestation of a plural nature going
on at the same time-some will have to operate at the elite level,
others at the local level to sensitize villagers.
Another example: The Mahakali Treaty,
a border river agreement between Nepal and India, which was signed
after three days of negotiations in January 1996, and ratified by
the Nepali Parliament by a two-thirds majority in September 1996,
provided for the completion of the project design within six months.
It has been six years, and they haven't moved an inch. How do you
build the world's largest dam in the Himalayas where there is an
absolute land shortage? India is heavily populated as is Nepal,
and our arable lands are all in the valley bottoms, just as on the
Indian side of the border in the new state called Uttaranchal. Indian
activists, who are much better organized and have a longer history
than their Nepali counterparts, have unilaterally opened high schools
all over the basin floor. It will be much more difficult to approve
now, and this dam will probably never be built because you would
have to compensate not only the individual village, but also the
community for the loss of their school.
Rights, and human rights in particular,
are defined to suit the context. In the North, many human rights
issues may be related to multinational companies and businesses
operating in such a way to transfer some of their external costs
onto the environment. In much of the South, it is still the Government
that does business. Kyoto, for example had lots of problems, simply
because southern and northern NGOs could not see eye to eye. One
was contesting the State, the other was contesting the market. In
one case the State was almost an ally, as in the European Union,
and Scandinavia in particular, whereas in much of the South, the
State is the enemy, because there is no market, or only an underground
market.
The core issue in the South is that
for the past fifty years, since the end of the Second World War
- the Age of Foreign Aid, as I call it - we having been trying to
promote development without market or capitalism. We still do not
have the instruments of capitalism in place, which Europe has taken
500 years to implement. On the other hand, we have loaded onto the
State - a State that was poor at regulation to start with - the
functions of both the market and civil society. It has possibly
already become the straw that has broken many a State's back in
the South, where they are incapable of doing all three of these
things: neither regulation, nor market, nor cautionary civil society.
Our hope is that the use of human rights as an international discourse
will be able to redress the balance so that the protest against
technological choices can be done early on, and we avoid the solipsism
of banking everything on one institutional structure. Thank you.
Questions and Answers
Q: How effective have contestation
and civil society been in the South?
Gyawali: Unless they have one
single target, it is very difficult for individuals or organizations,
or even the bureaucracy, to accomplish their goals. For instance,
bureaucrats will become confused if asked to accomplish two seemingly
conflicting objectives at the same time, such as maximizing social
benefits and minimizing the State. The lack of a primary objective
led to the failure of the Water Resources Planning Act of 1965,
eventually repealed by President Reagan fifteen years later. The
academic exercise was wonderful, but none of the departments could
implement it because there were too many conflicting objectives.
NGO (non-governmental organization)
is a very common term in the developing world, but a broader definition
is needed. There are business-organized NGOs (BONGOs), which operate
as businesses and are not regarded as activist. Banks are now funding
through NGOs, and every contractor is registered and operating as
an NGO. Similarly, there are aid- and donor-organized NGOs (DONGOs),
in addition to Government organized NGOs (GONGOs). The real civil
society is therefore limited to NGOs not associated with the State
or the market. If there are a sufficient number of these NGOs, in
the end, the clumsy and messy institutions, or institutional arrangements,
will be much more stable. Short, neat, rigid solutions like the
former Soviet Union can collapse and break. Governments use the
stability argument to justify rigid systems as opposed to the clumsy,
messy arrangements associated with democracies.
Each group pursuing its brand of activism
needs to find its own tools, and there are enough tools around.
As for multinational companies, we should understand that globalization
stretches back into our history beyond economic integration. For
instance, the United Nations was an attempt at globalizing bureaucratic
solidarity. You have the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, which
is one example of organization around globalization.
There are groups of activists, as
in Rio at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992,
which come together and have a common position. The Internet is
one of the most useful tools for activists, by allowing communication
across Government-set barriers. Interestingly, when you look at
most Southern activists these days, as those in India and Pakistan
testify, they get along perfectly with each other, unlike their
respective governments. In addition, while they cooperate with each
other across borders, they have difficulty cooperating with their
respective governments. Subsequently, the whole global framework
of identifying with the nation state, as the United Nations has
bequeathed upon us, and the idea of "international", becomes problematic.
Somehow we need to go beyond that, into a discourse of international
collaboration that transcends the nation-centric containers not
only at the activist level, but at a larger level.
Q: How are women contributing
to local development initiatives?
Gyawali: I used to chair one
of the largest poverty alleviation NGOs in Nepal in a voluntary
capacity, and one of my most fulfilling experiences was working
on programs aimed at empowering women. In Northern Ghurka, a remote
part of Nepal, we were helping women to generate income by motivating
them to form groups and produce items for market in their free time.
What we discovered was that, as in many areas of Nepal, it takes
about three hours a day to carry the water they use in the dry season.
So if you have to get up at two in the morning to carry water, where
is your free time? I was against any kind of engineering work in
this NGO, but other people insisted that these women had to get
water. I agreed on certain conditions, mainly that the women would
control and manage any arrangement we set up, and we organized a
Women's Water Users Group, and replicated it elsewhere.
Interestingly enough, almost everywhere
we attempted to form a new group, they would refuse to call themselves
a Women's Water Users Group, because it would alienate the men.
So even though only women were using water and most of the men were
gone hunting for half the year, they rejected a women's group. However,
in every scheme where women themselves organized and managed the
process, rather than having something built for them, the cost was
about 30-50% less than Government-developed schemes.
The groups also proved efficient in
completing strenuous maintenance tasks. Once Government schemes
are completed, the minister comes and inaugurates them, after which
they are forgotten. A person had to walk for about an hour and a
half up a hill to the extraction site to ensure that all the pipes
are in place and undamaged by animals. By distributing duties to
every household, the local groups have devised their own unique
system to oversee the scheme that works perfectly. They use a marble
system, in which a blue-colored marble is put into the intake, and
there is a red marble that brings it back and brings it to the next
person, telling a third person that he would get a certain color
marble from someone else.
Q: How has human rights discourse
been advantageous to contestation?
Gyawali: The last ten years
in Nepal have been amazing; we call it "democracy on fast-forward".
In the last decade alone, we have accomplished more under this constitutional
monarchy than the British did in the last 700 years. Before 1990,
we had primarily party-based politics, where people associated themselves
with the underground Congress Party, Communist Party, or similar
parties. This is no longer the case. Now that we have political
rights, all the activists have joined parties and lost their credibility
completely. Therefore, there is a need for activists who are involved
in "issue-based" politics and not necessarily affiliated with a
political party, as was the case previously.
A success story of "issue-based" activism
was getting rid of smoke belching three-wheelers in Kathmandu that
increased air pollution and caused asthma. These have now been replaced
by battery and natural gas operated three-wheelers. Activists argued
for the right to good health, which was threatened by air pollution
that caused some children to become asthmatic in their third year.
Although there are other problems with Kathmandu's air, especially
caused by big factories, you can now feel the difference, especially
in the winter. This kind of activism can open the space. Otherwise,
one is either a member of the Communist Party or a Congress intellectual
or a Royalist, and any attempts at initiating programs are paralyzed.
So the issue is how to achieve this alternate framing of the discourse
to get alternate space.
Q: What is the effect of population
growth on poverty and water resources?
Gyawali: A Southern perspective
on the population issue is slightly different from that of the North.
Through poverty programs that I have worked with, it seems as that
a large family is the only insurance poor people have. I did a calculation
once in a Himalayan roadless village with a farmer who had just
about enough land to feed his family for maybe seven months a year.
The remaining five months he would be forced to find a seasonal
job. In that kind of marginal scenario, a family of fewer then 12.2
persons is just not viable. Carrying water and caring for cattle
are full-time jobs. Domestic household chores, including caring
for children are a full-time job. Farming is an overtime job. Still
someone else must trade to ensure cash income required to buy basic
necessities such as clothes. With an average life expectancy of
46 years, and fairly high child mortality rates, unless you have
six or seven children, your hope of having at least one them survive
until your own old age, if you are fortunate to live long yourself,
is next to zero. There is no pension scheme or social security system,
and having supporting children is the only social security available.
As a result, population programs have been inadequate in addressing
this issue, because they have only focused on family planning techniques,
and largely neglected the poverty issue.
The major discourse of water supply
in Kathmandu, which is not so much a supply problem as a distribution
problem, is an interesting case to illustrate. People stand in line
for water for three hours during the dry season. Pictures in the
Kathmandu Post show people queuing all night, waiting for
a tap to open up to get a jar of water. While villagers need to
climb a hill for three hours, people in the city can stand in line
and chat with their friends. This social benefit has caused migration
from villages to the city. If you reduce the city's water availability
time from three hours to two hours, the migration would increase.
I am not denying that there is a population problem, but it has
to be informed from these other quadrangles. We must be aware of
possible unforeseen consequences of actions taken in the name of
development.
The idea of population control is
a hierarchical solidarity; in other words a reliance on a top-down
approach to environmentalism. Occasionally, the market will encourage
a different development. When President Nixon first went to China,
euphoria reigned in the U.S. that China represented "a billion consumers."
The market gets excited as the population grows, and thus there
is no market incentive to prevent population growth. On the egalitarian
side, which is where the human rights issue comes from, it gets
much more complicated. Advocating population control needs to be
supplemented by a discussion of insurance schemes and health care
for poor people, to ensure that children survive. This is how water
issues interact with human rights and population control questions.
Voluntary science must be given adequate space to address these
issues and ask these other kinds of questions.
A third of Nepal is now under Maoist
control because elected politicians built houses for themselves
and sent their children to fancy schools rather than serving the
people. The situation has become so bad that the elected representatives
are reluctant to return to their constituencies because the Maoists
are in control there. The situation at the grassroots level has
spurred many questions, including what decentralization means. Devolution
of power to more local bodies is a big agenda, which the restoration
of democracy in 1990 failed to achieve. Egalitarian forces, previously
driven underground, are not coming out of the woodwork. Because
the democratic Government would not devolve power to the local level,
you now have a local state under Maoist control. An enlightened
polity would not see critical civil society as a threat, but rather
as an important critical voice. But the inability to provide space
to civil society results in the trolls and goblins coming out of
the woodwork.
In the poverty alleviation work that
I was involved in, many of the villages were terribly marginalized
and in absolute poverty with perhaps one person who was close to
literate, but barely recognized letters. We would have a "motivator"
live in the village for at least six months before forming an income-generating
group. The group members themselves were responsible for deriving
strategies, and the motivator's role was to evaluate them and inform
them of potential difficulties. The ideas they came up with to improve
their well-being were stunning, and each village had different scenarios.
In one place I recall, a very poor
area, they wanted to grow a saffron-like plant, a very expensive,
fragrant spice. Previous generations in the village had grown the
spice, but it had degraded along the way. They did not have the
flower that produces the spice, and had to send off to Kashmir to
get it. Apparently, they currently have a thriving business. This
sort of initiative would never come out of a consultancy to the
World Bank, or from me, or anybody else, but has to come from the
villages themselves.
Q: How does contestation differ
on the local and national levels?
Gyawali: When national or international
policies affect the local level, certain things cannot be addressed
at the national, or even district level. Different styles of operation
at different scales are needed, and as you go up and down the scales,
your styles have to change. It is perhaps not so much about promoting
activism, but rather promoting the market. For instance, the people
who work in development are almost genetically trained to reject
the middleman. Such people are perceived as profit-seeking swine
that should not be allowed anywhere near the village. We were working
with an income-generating group that was growing fruits in one area
in mid-west Nepal. We asked them if they had encountered any problems,
to which they replied: "the problem is we have no middleman." When
we asked why they wanted to bring these "leeches" in, they replied
that they were farmers and had no time to market the fruits. A farmer
subsequently outlined the process. If he took a load of mangos to
the bazaar, he would be cheated at every step. It would therefore
save a lot of time to sell the entire load at once through a middleman
to assess the price, pay for it, and ensure a better return. We
then brought back several middlemen and mediated a fair arrangement.
The farmer was actually talking about a "futures market," despite
being illiterate and having no Harvard M.B.A. And the futures market
has worked perfectly in an area so remote, you would never think
it would work.
Sometimes at the local level, a monoculture
may exist because the villagers have been so fatalized by an extreme
landlord or clan leader. As an example, I visited two villages on
opposite sides of a small stream. One village had three ethnicities,
one of which is regarded as an "untouchable" group in Nepal, and
there was constant fighting, making it difficult to implement projects.
But whatever they did agree on would definitely be much more stable.
On the other side, there was a homogenous village, which we thought
would be easier. However, it had one big man who made all the decisions,
and the local youth who wanted to challenge him had to rely on a
Government agency or an NGO to fight their fight on their behalf.
This clumsiness on the local level
is quite varied, and depends on the degree to which the local community
is pluralized. In some cases, the sense of fatalism is very high
within the village population. But even in the monoculture villages
that are clan-based or have similar political arrangements, their
cost-benefit calculations are quite well done. One cousin may be
part of the Communist Party, another in the Congress Party, and
yet another is a Royalist. As a result, no matter who comes to power,
they have established political connections. In the process, suddenly
the demands of the parties influence their decisions, and they become
contested. But in general, the more you open up the plurality, and
the clumsiness that follows, the greater the chance that at least
something will work. If it is not clumsy, something may work brilliantly
for a while, but then collapse.
The democratic process on which Nepal
has embarked, as messy and complicated as it is, has been more effective
at the local level where there is contestation and a search for
a median way from the start, before initiatives get entrenched.
We should continue the devolution of power to these local bodies
and see where it goes from there. They may favor a regulation of
some type, but let it be a demand-driven rather than imposed regulation.
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