Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
80-102)
DR MARY
HOBLEY AND
PROFESSOR MICK
MOORE
12 JANUARY 2010
Q80 Andrew Stunell: If you were in
charge, you would say that the UK's collective input—not
necessarily DFID's—should be on getting that constitutional
settlement PDQ.
Dr Hobley: Absolutely. Definitely.
Also, helping to inform that settlement by getting very, very
clear vision and understanding at the more local levels about
what forms of governance do people really want; just trying to
get that understanding at the district, whatever level it is.
However, that dialogue is not sufficiently in place, so what you
are getting instead is these political parties trying to control
those spaces without a bigger decision about what local government,
local governance, local structures should be. For me, I think
this is a real role for something like DFID, and, particularly
with their support to the local government community development
project, this is an opening. However, there is a real lack of
vision at those lower levels about what this could be, and an
informed understanding and challenge to the parties to help open
up that space at the local levels. I would be very, very keen
to see that happen.
Q81 Andrew Stunell: Does that suggest
that DFID should be investing some time and effort in educating
or, at least, conversing with the political parties?
Dr Hobley: Yes, but at lower levels
as well as at the Kathmandu level; so getting down there. Also,
just opening up debate, more sort of town hall debates about what
is the future of Nepal at the local level, so that it is not just
all happening in Kathmandu.
Chairman: Corruption is also a problem,
which I guess requires a settlement.
Q82 Mr Lancaster: Yes it is endemic
in Nepalese society, so I suppose the obvious question is where
do you think it is at its worst, and how can donors such as DFID
engage to try and tackle it? Certainly when we went on our visit
there was a stated political will to try and deal with it, although
whether or not that has actually seen much action in reality is
a different matter. What can we do to try and help tackle it?
Professor Moore: I have rarely
seen as corrupt a country as Nepal, in the broad sense of the
term. That is partly just people stealing money but I also mean,
when I say that, the extent to which it is a very exclusionary
political system and there are small numbers of people who steal
money, and they are setting the system up so they can stay in
power to carry on stealing money. So it is awful at the local
level. I think my pragmatic attitude to this—I think it
is pragmatic—will be to say that, frankly, there is very
little we can do. We have to do certain things, as I understand
DFID is trying to do at present, which is to say: "You are
not stealing our money". We have to try and protect the British
aid programme. I was told the stories there (Mary probably knows
many more) about more or less direct intimidation over tenders
and contracting, etc., and real attempts to do something about
that. My own view is that given the size of the security and order
problems, generally speaking, to really try to tackle corruption,
at this stage, would be a waste of effort. I think there is very
little we can do about it. What we need is a little more order
and, hopefully, with a little more order if the Indian economy
carries on growing the general economic environment will get better
and I think it will be much easier to tackle that somewhere down
the road, but not at present as a major concern. That would be
my view.
Dr Hobley: I think that is probably
a very sad reflection on the truth. It is very interesting and
you often hear—and I do not know true this is—some
people say that corruption has been important in maintaining the
peace and, in a way, it buys off particular groups and people
who may cause more problems. I am not sure I subscribe to that
but maybe there is a short-term period in which corruption has
to be accepted but managed, and it is only when some of these
other, bigger parts of the state are in place that it can really
be dealt with. For me, when corruption hits at the lowest level
and for the poorest people I do find it very difficult to say:
"Yes, let's just turn a blind eye to it". We are back,
again, to these issues of how you begin to build more accountable
systems at the local level. Again, I think, even though the political
settlement is not properly in place, there is still a moment now
to be building the right types of accountability at the local
level in order to start addressing some of these issues around
corrupt practice so that it is not allowed to embed. I have seen
in other countries where corruption has been allowed to foster
and to build that it embeds itself so deeply in the system (Cambodia
is a very good example of this) that it is almost impossible to
unpick it when the state becomes more stable. It becomes the way
the state and citizens expect services—everything—to
be delivered; you have to pay, you have to do this. For me, in
Nepal, yes, corruption is very bad but let us try not to embed
those structures that are already being developed at the moment
and look at how we can start pushing back and making sure that
we get the right forms of local government accountabilities in
place, even at this very early stage, to try and start pushing
back up the system.
Professor Moore: Could I just
add one thing there, Mr Chairman? I think a very good short-term
target would be that more of the corrupt money actually goes into
the central coffers of political parties rather than into the
pockets of individual politicians, because the more parties we
have with a decent amount of resourcing, who can actually employ
staff and campaign, the better politics will be. One of the very
unpleasant features of so much that goes on in Nepal at present
is that corruption really does go into the pockets of individuals;
politics is very "fashionalised"; people join parties
and leave parties very quickly.
Q83 Mr Lancaster: Just picking up
on one thing you said, can we be confident that British taxpayers'
money is not involved in this? You are smiling, which I sense
means that we cannot be confident. When DFID is running its programmes,
you hinted that you thought that, perhaps, DFID money was—not
intentionally but as part of the culture—being siphoned
off and heading elsewhere.
Professor Moore: Mary, you should
answer this in more detail, but I know that this is a major concern,
at least it has been in the DFID office. I talk to people, and
a lot of effort is going in to trying to make sure it does not
happen, in terms of auditing—I had descriptions of attempts
at intimidation on tenders for DFID projects and how they tried
to circumvent that. So this is something that DFID are concerned
about for very understandable reasons.
Q84 Mr Lancaster: So the short answer
is yes, or historically yes.
Dr Hobley: And very, very difficult
to know exactly where every single bit of money is going; really
difficult to track it. As Mick says, a huge amount of effort is
going in to making sure that money is being correctly used and
is going to the right places, but it requires an enormous amount
of monitoring to do it. All the donors are really concerned about
this and I think DFID has done a huge amount to try and address
these problems, but you hear the Swiss, everybody—they are
all looking at how they can better track the way money is being
used. It is not just money; it is who the services go to, what
the money is buying and who actually benefits from this? You see
so much corruption in that way as well where money is supposed
to go to the very poorest groups; you go down to the villages,
they are not getting it, it is going to another group because
of the way the patronage system works at that level. Unless you
have incredibly able, independent and politically removed people
facilitating these processes it is very difficult to erase those
forms of corruption, where services are directed to a particular
group of people away from another group. So, yes, I think you
can do as much as is possible to protect but, again, unless at
the local level you are building systems where accountability
can really be built in a more democratic process then it is going
to be very hard to challenge, at those local levels, who gets
the services and who does not, and who is included and who is
excluded.
Q85 Chairman: We have talked briefly
about the lack of local government. Those of us who were in Baglung
had a couple of examples—and those were really a positive
feedback about the desire for it—first of all, I think,
in the forest community where, particularly the women, were saying:
"We used to have a jolly good local chairman of the local
council who was a woman, who we could turn to and now there is
nobody local". The agent who was effectively charged with
delivering services locally commendably said: "I am here
on behalf of the government to do this, but my problem is I am
not accountable or responsible." So he was anxious to say:
"I would like to have a locally accountably and a locally
elected body". What are the chances of this happening and
what can donors do to bring it about?
Dr Hobley: Unfortunately, a lot
of it is still dependent on getting the constitution in place
by May 2010, and that will then determine the structure of the
state and then determine when the local government elections can
happen. In the interim there is, at the very local level, a committee
of political parties and other interested people who are supposed
to provide this initial form of decision making, accountability
and local development planning and budgeting. There is, as you
know, through the local governance programme and now through government,
large amounts of money going down to the village development committees,
which are for planning local development activities. So there
is now an active process of trying to re-engage government and
citizens at that local level. In a sense, the more that can be
done to strengthen that and to occupy it in a way that is not
going to lead to greater patronage, I think, is a very important
thing, because this is what it is demonstrating to people what
the future of Nepal may be. This is now where they are beginning
to feel: "Okay, local government is coming back into place".
I think the work that DFID is doing with the other donors in the
national programme around local governance and community development
is very important, but it does come back, again, to needing to
build this understanding of what local government should be like
and not what local government has been even during the civil war
and was previous to the civil war, where a lot of the local government
experience was still around highly patronage-based politics. So
how we reconstruct that understanding of local government at that
local level, to me, is critical to how people take Nepal into
the future. So, yes, the constitution is essential but building
the blocks underneath is really, really critical, and some of
the things I was seeing recently were around how, again, the political
parties are trying to control the different projects and services
that are coming down, and are trying to allocate those to their
party members or co-opt particular local groups—forestry
groups, mothers groups, whatever it is—to those particular
political parties. These are the future vote bank so there is
a huge amount of effort going in by the political parties to start
really positioning themselves to control the space. So I think
this is a very, very important moment in time. This next year/two
years are really critical for Nepal looking forward into a future
where it has a different form of political process. It is obviously
going to take a long time to embed it but what I think we do not
want to do is reinforce what was there in the past and people's
expectations of the past.
Q86 Andrew Stunell: Dr Hobley, you
have given us evidence to show that, if you like, the community-based
organisations are a somewhat ambiguous concept and you have mentioned
the political parties' influence on them, and it is not all Age
Concern and CAB[3]
when it gets down to the village level; it is perhaps something
which the community based organisations convey that might not
quite translate well. Can you say something about the balance
of the provision that they make and the influence and advocacy
that they have against the risks there are to having the kind
of independent local government system you have got? If I could
just press you a little bit on that, is it perhaps a little bit
naive to think that you could have a local government structure
where the local politics was essentially removed?
Dr Hobley: It is impossible to
have local politics removed, but what I think you would hope to
see is some balance to the way politics are being used at the
local level. Obviously, that is around, again, how you build people's
ability to engage in these political processes. At the moment,
in a lot of villages, not all, there are a lot of community-based
organisations which do a variety of things. The forestry ones
are interesting because they have a resource, they have money
and they have a large number of members. Because of that they
can actually act in a way like a local government; they can decide
who gets access to the resource, they can decide who gets access
to funds, and a lot of very positive things have happened from
that process. Also, what they are tending to do now is to occupy
what should be the local government space because they have funds,
they have services and all the rest of it, which, during the period
of conflict was important; they did deliver and they did maintain
a level of social cohesion that I think was quite critical. Again,
I think what we should now be looking at is how you balance those
dangers and the positive sides of these community-based organisations
with their relationship with an emerging local government and
how you can balance the power of that so that the decisions that
are being made about who gets access to services are not ones
that just remain the very patronage-based ones which generally
they are (particularly in the Tarai areas they very much are),
but are based much more on careful exploration of who really requires
the services and why they are getting them. So how that interface
between over 400,000 more of these community organisations plus
local government is developed is critical to make sure that local
government itself has the power, the space and the authority to
start making decisions for the whole citizenship and not for an
interest group based on forestry or an interest group based on
water or on mothers' health, or whatever else it is, but is looking
across the whole populace. At the moment, there is a real issue
of these different groups dividing up territory within the local
area, and if you are not in a group you do not have a voice and
you do not have access to services. For the very poor there are
very high transaction costs to being involved in all these different
groups to get access to services and often they both do not go
into them because of the high transaction costs but, also, they
are excluded because of their own social conditions. So local
government should be sitting over this and should be able to take
a whole overview of all the systems that are within that. The
problem we have and the one we need to guard against is to avoid
the community-based organisations remaining and the de facto way
in which decisions are taken about who gets access to services
and who does not. So it is redressing that balance that is going
to be crucial in getting local government into a position and
at a sufficiently high level as well as local level to be able
to take decisions that are not influenced by politics or by patronage.
Of course it will continue to happen but we need to be aware and
understanding of how to try and prevent that.
Q87 Andrew Stunell: Can I take you
just a little bit further on that? We visited a forest management
project and we were given the impression that that, also, encompassed
the fact that a school was being built, water and sanitation,
bio-gas—a whole lot of projects seemed to be integrated
there. Are you saying that that is a pretty unusual case?
Dr Hobley: It is not unusual.
A lot of the forestry groups have, over the years, taken on a
local developmental role and not just a forestry role, for good
reason: they did have the funds and there was a real belief that
this was a way of trying to get local development going. I do
see considerable dangers in that becoming a reasonably unaccountable
form of decision-making about who gets what, and I am not sure
that for the future of Nepal this is necessarily the way to continue.
I would like to see some of those activities moved into the local
government space and not remain within these forestry groups where
the levels of accountability are not very great and you have either
a strong voice within it or no voice within it. Definitely for
a lot of the groups where they are very poor people, although
they may be members, they do not necessarily have access to the
facilities.
Q88 Andrew Stunell: I would just
comment on that that if I was on the village committee or the
forest management group and local government was set up in my
area I would want to be on that local government. So I think,
actually, you would see quite a transfer across. I would also
comment that we were told and introduced to people who were members
of the Dalit community who had apparently benefited from that.
Could I possibly take you off in a completely different direction
for a moment?
Professor Moore: Can I go back
to an earlier point, Mr Chairman, before we go there, which was
what can donors do? I would like to say I think there is one thing
donors could do in terms of local government which is they could
provide more active encouragement for setting up a reasonable
urban property tax system to give at least urban governments and
local governments a financial basis. They do not have one, at
present. I think we are a long way away from—
Q89 Chairman: We are back to this
country, again!
Professor Moore: They also do
not have a system of central fiscal transfers from Kathmandu,
so really sub-national governments have very little funding. It
is not actually that difficult to do these days, and I think that
would be one very positive thing that donors could encourage.
Q90 Andrew Stunell: The point I was
going to make is that drawing on the experience of visiting one
project during our visit, obviously, I am a world expert on this!
However, it seemed as though the provision of services was being
reasonably well integrated; it seemed as though it was being provided
or, at least, made available to all members of the community including
Dalit members, and so on. Indeed they seemed to have census figures
and a very clear perception inside the village of who were high-paid,
low-paid, Dalits, etc, etc. So that looked like a good model.
Can I just test you on another project that we visited, which
was relating to the retired Gurkha village development project?
You have expressed concern that, maybe, aid and projects are not
getting to those at the bottom of the pile. Would it be your judgment
that in the case of the retirement projects that is happening,
or is there a selection of villages and, maybe, people within
villages there which is not pro-poor?
Dr Hobley: I think it is quite
difficult for me to comment on because I do not know the project
at all. It is very interesting if you do not look at projects
but you look at people, and you go and spend time with people
and say: "Okay, what are you doing? How are you getting your
livelihood together? What services are you getting? What credit
are you getting?" They will reel off, maybe, 10 groups that
they are members of to get access to water, to get access to education,
to get access to different types of credit, and they will tell
you how many hours they spend in each of these groups and different
types of meetings. For some people it is a huge amount of time.
Then you start looking at who these people are, and what you find
is that those who are more capable are able to spend more of their
time accessing these groups and accessing services, and also what
you find is that those who are generally the wealthier or were
former patrons within the village often control most of these
groups and control access to them as well. So what it is is a
very conditional way in which development is allowed to people.
If you go further down the system to extremely poor or to particularly
marginalised groups, the forestry programme has been very good
at trying to get the Dalits involved but this is not the case
across all projects. Even though people talk about it, actually
when you go down there and look what you find is that a clustering
of people who get access to services are generally those who are
more able, and a clustering of those who are extremely poor who
really get access to very little at all. Often they would also
be in the most dire situation and a lot of them will have to migrate
for the very poor labour services; there is very little agricultural
labour left because of the change to the Land Reform Act in 1997,
which meant that the tenancy arrangements there changed a lot.
So, again, there is a lot of agricultural land that is not being
properly used now, so local labour opportunities are very limited.
In the absence of that these people are looking for daily labour—that
is what they spend their days doing—and trying to get into
these groups is very difficult for them; they do not have the
time, they actively exclude themselves and they are, also, passively
excluded by the groups because they cannot pay regular amounts
of money on credit, which is usually a requirement to be part
of that group. So there are lots and lots of barriers, why projects
are causing further exclusion, and lots of reasons why they do
that, and it is not until you start looking at people, rather
than projects, that you start to see this. If you look at one
project it actually looks quite successful but if you look at
the people in that area and look at all the projects that they
are involved with, actually there is a large number who are not
in any of these projects, and you start seeing a very different
story. It is interesting, once we start getting these questions
going, that lots of projects have started asking the same questions
and found the same answers across much of Nepal, that what looks
good from a project perspective is not so good when you look at
it from an individual household perspective instead of from a
project eye.
Q91 Andrew Stunell: Is there a way
of dealing with that? Could the donors, and DFID in particular,
take a different approach which would overcome that problem or
mitigate it?
Dr Hobley: Yes, moving away from
projects, obviously (and DFID has been good about trying to reduce
the use of projects), and, again, looking into the future around
how you get more sub-national budgeting which allows decisions
to be made at the more local level for all the citizens rather
than on a highly-projectised basis approach where you do X project
delivering X services, where, again, the accountabilities are
very clear. When you ask people where that money has come from
and who are you going to hold to account, it is the NGO that has
delivered the project or it is a donor that has delivered the
project—it is not government. They are not putting pressure
on local government or the district or central government and
saying: "Why are you not doing this"; they are putting
pressure back on to the project: "Why are we not having more
of this? Why are we not having more of that?" Again, how
do you reconstruct relationships where people are looking into
the government, into the local government and into those that
should be providing the services to push there for greater accountability?
The projects, because of the conflict, have really got in the
way of that.
Q92 Andrew Stunell: My point about
Gurkha retirement villages?
Dr Hobley: I have only been to
one and that was on a casual walk-through, so I cannot answer
you. I am really sorry. If I had been there and looked at it more
carefully I could answer.
Q93 Mr Lancaster: I am going to embarrass
you, actually, Mary, and say that apparently you describe yourself
as one of the main international commentators on community forestry,
which I am sure is the case, so can I ask you, perhaps, to comment
on the effectiveness of DFID's forestry programmes? In particular,
they claim that for every £35 spent on the LFP one person
is permanently taken out of poverty, which sounds fantastic. Is
that what you would expect? Is that realistic, or are they perhaps
being a touch—well ...
Dr Hobley: I think they are being
a touch optimistic there. Currently, they are about to do some
longer-term evaluations in looking at exactly these issues and
to look at their poverty impacts. I think, hopefully, those will
provide a more systematic and more careful analysis. That was
a fairly quick study. Actually, the forestry programme is very
interesting in DFID because this is an example of where DFID has
committed over a very, very long period to one sector (we are
talking 20, 25 years) and what we are seeing in many ways is the
good harvest of that investment. If you are looking at it in terms
of forests, so environmental impact, it is massive: there are
trees now where there were never trees and there is huge change
across the hills of Nepal. If you are looking at in terms of people's
access to forest resources who are members of forest user groups,
it has changed. The question always is: who has it changed for
and by how much has it changed? My life started out in community
forestry and most of my work was in community forestry—I
was a great believer in it—but, as I have been saying, one
of the things I am very concerned about is how it forms interest
groups rather than forming a political process where everybody
has a chance to make decisions about how resources are allocated.
So I think, for the future of community forestry and the future
of DFID's involvement, it is how it looks wider than just forestry
and it looks at these interfaces between the groups that are being
formed and the local government processes that are being put in
place, and that is where I think it should be shifting. In terms
of investment, in building a huge network of organisations that
are able to mobilise and to manage resources, it is an extraordinary
success. If you look at the Tarai, however, it is nowhere; you
have very valuable forest resources, government will not hand
them over to communities, they are a source of large corruption,
they are a source of huge amounts of money and they are now also
a source of huge political tension because they are areas where
the Maoists are pushing land encroachments for landless peoples.
So forests in the mid-hills are an easy story; there was already
a very strong informal structure there. Forests in highly contested
areas are very difficult, and I think, again, for the future for
DFID, how it deals in the Tarai in forestry is going to be a very
critical element of how peace or conflict starts to continue within
the Tarai. The Madhesh issues, the indigenous issues around the
forests are huge—really, really huge. The questions around
land and those forests are also very big. Yes, success after a
huge amount of long-term investment (and I think that also is
interesting in the sense of how much time do you have to invest
to bring success), but also the very, very big thorny questions
that even over these 20 years DFID has not been able to address
in the Tarai, which are going to grow even more.
Q94 Mr Evans: How difficult is it
to encourage more private businesses to set up in Nepal?
Professor Moore: One thing that
was quite striking to me was in 2008 when the Maoists were about
to come into power and came into power. The private sector actually
was not terrified, and you think they would have been, but they
seemed to be relatively happy. The biggest problem the private
sector face is not particular political parties or particular
policies, it is just the general insecurity and everything that
goes on around it—the extortion, etc. All the surveys and
talking to business people just give you the same answer: if they
had a government that could actually keep order and deliver on
what it said it was going to deliver, frankly, I do not think
they would care which party or which combination of parties was
in it. The other very big issue over this is because most economic
activity in Nepal is in the Tarai, not far from the Indian border,
there is so much cross-border activity that it is very hard, often,
to say if you are talking about the Nepali economy or the Indian
economy. There are lots of reasons for businesses to shift both
sides of the border. So I think there is every reason to think
that with a reasonable amount of political order the private sector
would be okay. It is interesting, the rate of private investment
in Nepal. If you look at success stories, it has gone up in the
last 10 years quite appreciably as a proportion of national income,
even during the course of the civil war. So, clearly, the private
sector sees profit opportunities here; this is not regarded as
a hopeless case.
Q95 Mr Evans: Is this something that
you think donors can help in trying to support?
Professor Moore: My sense is that
because the primary problem is the security there is nothing that
donors can do directly about that. There are all kinds of little
things that need to be done about the investment climate, but
I think they are only secondary at present, and they are the kind
of things—small changes in legislation—that could
take place later. I do not think donors need to do more than give
the right signals. I would also add on that that much to my surprise
I do not see that the Maoist party, even, is anti-private sector.
What is quite interesting about the Maoists is that they controlled
enough of rural areas for long enough that they learnt how you
tax people, and they realised that a thriving private sector is
good for them and good for everyone else. So although there is
a lot of rhetoric, of course, at one level, I think in reality
there is no big problem here.
Q96 Mr Evans: What could they do?
You mentioned taxing. What more could they do to strengthen the
taxation system to get the revenues in and to have better public
finance management?
Professor Moore: The Maoist finance
minister claims—I cannot remember whether it was in the
first six months he was finance minister—he increased tax
revenues by something like 30%, I think (I cannot remember the
exact figure). However, there is a tremendous amount of leakage,
and that is partly because the dominant source of tax revenue
is the border with India, and that is where its import duties
and VAT—most taxes—are levied, and that is a very
corrupt operation. My understanding is that they raised more taxes
just because there was more oversight of what was going on and
probably a lot people were frightened of carrying on with the
previous corruption. So my sense of this is that it is not that
you need major reform of the tax system; it is just improving
the current system and making sure there is less leakage and corruption
and you would be okay. The government of Nepal is not big enough
or competent enough to spend much more money very quickly. You
would not actually want them to have masses of money. I do not
think there is a sort of fundamental fiscal problem there.
Q97 John Battle: If I can ask a brief
question about employment. You mentioned that the economy of Nepal
is a function of the development and growth in India, but we met
people that wanted to know where are the jobs for young people,
particularly, and DFID, again, have made that a priority. There
is some suggestion that jobs can be generated in agriculture,
in tourism and, indeed, in renewable energy and water for the
region. Are there realistic prospects there? Should DFID be involved
in employment generation at that level?
Professor Moore: I think there
are a lot of realistic prospects. Agriculture in Nepal has done
very badly over the last 30 years or so—surprisingly badly
when you compare it to India next door where agriculture, on the
whole, has been booming. As the Indian economy grows India is
going to run short of labour and they are going to want to import
agricultural commodities from Nepal. So I think there are real
prospects and people have all kinds of ideas—bio-tourism,
and many other things. There are real possibilities. Whether DFID
can actually do much at this level I am a bit sceptical. I think
it is right, Mary (and you know more than me), that the big donor
investments in agriculture in Nepal, as opposed to forestry, have
ended up not terribly successful.
Dr Hobley: No.
Professor Moore: There is just
a sense now that the country does not have the agricultural extension
experts, the researchers and everything else that they would really
need. I do not see any kind of "big bang" here in the
agricultural sector. One thing the other donors could do, we have
in India now the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, which
does mobilise large numbers of people on public works—roads
etc. There is quite a lot of expertise in that region, especially
in India, in running these things in a not-too-corrupt fashion,
and Nepal could do that. I think from the political point of view
there is a lot that will be very advantageous for any government
in Kathmandu to have one flagship programme saying: "Look,
we're generating a lot of employment", and there is something
very visible. If you could get a decently designed scheme and
DFID were willing to fund it, that would be fine.
Q98 John Battle: What has come across
very clearly in this session, as Mary puts it, is the need for
these bigger questions politically (in the full sense of political
not party political) of governance to be right up there and tackled
first or we are getting nowhere.
Dr Hobley: One of the things around
employment, one of the things I found really startling, going
round the villages, is how few young men there are between the
ages 18 to 40; it is almost like an absent generation. You ask
questions where they are; they are in Malaysia, they are in the
Gulf, they are in India. You ask young men before the age of 18:
"What do you want to do?" and the last thing they want
to do is stay in the villages in agriculture. They said it is
a complete waste of time; there are no markets, it is drudgery—they
are not interested. I have seen (again, on small scales) interesting
things around developing the skills for people to migrate, which
is a dreadful thing to do, and, basically, Nepal has been a migration
remittance country for generations, but that is what it does to
be able to help them migrate more effectively. There are problems
now, of course, with the Gulf and the downturn and all of that.
What you do see is a lack of willingness for people to stay. Or,
if they do stay, they want service jobs; they do not want to be
in agriculture.
Q99 John Battle: It will be controversial
to say it but I was quite strangely disturbed over the break when
Gurkhas that can now come to Britain came to see me at my advice
surgery in inner city Leeds to tell me they are very disappointed
in Britain because their jobs and cars were not there. I said:
"And you were expecting to get straight to a job?" Partly
it was: how could they get a licence, could they drive a car and
what jobs could they get? So sometimes the expectation is part
of the problem.
Dr Hobley: Very definitely. This
is a new generation that has those expectations; they have different
exposure now and they are not prepared to accept what was there
before.
Q100 John Battle: Sadly, they were
asking could it be arranged for them to go back, having just arrived,
because they felt that they had been misled into expectations.
So balancing the expectations and impressions (I think was the
word you used earlier on) is very difficult, internationally as
well.
Professor Moore: Could I just
add one other point on the private sector? The big thing in Nepal
is hydropower. The potential is enormous. No one wants to risk
their money at present, for very good reasons. India, once again,
is key to this—it is going to be Indian capital that does
this. If you got significant Indian private money in hydropower
you really could flip expectations in a major way in the country.
Q101 John Battle: You control the
water table.
Professor Moore: Yes. It could
do extremely well.
Q102 Chairman: Thank you both very
much indeed. We have found the whole experience of Nepal a bit
different from other developing countries, fascinating and interesting.
There are a lot of good stories but, obviously, the political
settlement is key to the future. We are very grateful for the
background experience you have and for sharing it with us. Thank
you very much indeed.
Professor Moore: Thank you.
Dr Hobley: Thanks.
3 Citizen's Advice Bureaux Back
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