UNFORTUNATELY ONLY CORRUPT DONKEYS ARE AVAILABLE TO LIFT THE BURDEN

Dear Tej jee,

About 15 years ago, I was in Laprak for a while which was a village of
its own kind in the whole of hill Nepal. It was one single compact
village comprising of some six hundred households that constituted all
the nine wards of its VDC. While it was a very nice table land, its
physical situation was slightly projecting out to the south, thus,
generating constant concerns for the locals as well as the
"development visitors" if the whole of the village might one day come
crashing down to the valley below. So, what happened to the Laprak
people during the recent quake was only to be expected. They certainly
need to be resettled in a better location.

However, the Laprak case is only part of the story. In most of the
affected hills, it is mostly the poor who suffered extensively. Most
of them have been living in makeshift dwelling units, eking out an
existence from marginal lands that hardly met their need for more than
half a year in most cases. There are thousands and thousands of such
victims, and they too need to be resettled properly so that they could
get to live a more decent human life for themselves in New Nepal. If
some serious relief and rehab do not get underway more or less
instantaneously, the monsoon that would be here in full swing about a
month from now would take its own toll due to lack of food, medical
help and protection from rain. But we have seen it time and time again
that the government--composed of corrupt politicians and similarly
able bureaucrats--is only painfully incompetent to deliver any such
aid, let alone in a scale that the current situation demands. There is
only one institution in Nepal that has the organizational discipline
and capability to undertake such a mission--and that has also amply
demonstrated its competence in the relief work in recent quake--is the
Nepal army, aided by other security forces. My own suggestions have
been that (1) in order to make it a top priority emergency
undertaking, the task should be led by the President of the Republic
himself. After all, he is already leading a task of much lesser
magnitude and importance, the Churia Forest protection and
conservation. Therefore, the government must request the President to
take over this task of averting further disaster for the million of
victims of this 2072 Great Quake. To that end, the donor community too
which would be providing most resources for the task should proffer
their own suggestion to and impress upon the government and the
President their own concerns and sense of urgency. (2) Secondly, the
army which alone has the strength of some 100,000 people should be
asked to manage the whole undertaking of relief and rehab in all the
affected districts. (3) Thirdly, since most of the quake victims would
be rebuilding their lives in their own areas, they themselves should
be organized into their own user groups and put in charge of their own
relief and rehab with the support of t he army personnel. While this
would enable them to devise solutions in keeping with the
location-specific nature of the catastrophe that affected them, it
will also the relief and rehab work get underway simultaneously in all
places, thus helping the victims to avert the possible misery to which
they would otherwise be exposed after the onset of the monsoon in
particular. In all this, we must make sure that the politicians almost
all of whom are corrupt to the bone must be kept completely out of the
loop. Let them shed crocodile tears in the form of "sankalpa prastav"
etc in their overcrowded Constituent Assembly--most of them have no
business being there--where they have been mercilessly consuming the
precious scarce resources that should have gone to the disaster
victims just now. I hope it makes sense to you.

Bihari Krishna Shrestha