By Pushpa Raj Pradhan
Since the spread of corona virus pandemic in the country, Nepal has been locked down halting virtually all economic activities. It seems, lockdown is the only medicine that the government knows.
Amidst corona virus pandemic and lockdown, we saw political activities – issuance of two controversial ordinances, overnight unification of two tarai based political parties, abdication charge as well as the charge of attempting split of the tarai based parties on the Oli government, scrapping the ordinances and finally demanding for Oli’s resignation!
How to rescue the economy from the post coronavirus impact should have been the concern of the sincere leaders who love their motherland. It is strange to note, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is seriously concerned on how to save his government from the ongoing political crisis and his opponents in the party are seriously concerned on how to finish PM Oli’s group! They are less bothered about the country’s situation.
Already the country’s economy has been seriously hit hard, in fact the revenue has come almost to zero. In our earlier edition, we had prescribed the government to allow resuming economic activities along with maintaining necessary precautions by separating districts with green and red areas of corona virus outbreak. Instead of encouraging economic activities, the government on 26 April, announced extension of the lockdown period for further ten days! We had also suggested to the government to conduct corona virus test through throat swab technology at mass level by stopping rapid test technology. As the government officials are involved in corruption, in spite of experts’ demand to stop rapid test and conduct throat swab tests, the Health Ministry has insisted rapid test from which the medical staffers have failed to receive accurate results. This is why, local people too are found coronavirus positive even after one month of lockdown period!
Clearly, the government has failed to manage the quarantine of suspected individuals properly, the government has failed to trace other people who were in contact with the coronavirus infected people. Due to such reasons, the government had to extend the lockdown period for ten days even after lockdown of one month! As the government has not been able to trace those people in contact with coronavirus infected people and also migration from India, we don’t know how long the lockdown period is going to be extended!
We had assumed, the government would take lessons from the coronavirus impact and take action for recovery of the economy, at least, introducing programmes encouraging farmers so that we could once again become self-reliant on agriculture products. Contrary to that, farmers are facing scarcity of fertilizers! In spite of World Food Programme, IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank international agencies’ warning, the government officials are busy in making the crisis as an opportunity to earn money through corruption!
The government has totally neglected the post coronavirus impact in the economy. On the other hand, the government has announced distributing minimum six-aanaas of precious land in the Kathmandu Valley to those landless people. Understandably, the government is planning to distribute land to its party workers, rather than the real landless people!
In fact, distributing land is not the proper solution of helping landless people but encouraging people to become landless by hiding their ancestors’ property in different districts. Better, the government would have taught them how to fish instead of distributing them fish!
Time and again, we have been reporting that if we neglect the process of strengthening our domestic economy, the economy may collapse. Are we aware about the seriousness of the situation?
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