GOD

Budget 2010/2011

Budget staves off looming crisis

KATHMANDU, NOV 20 -
Post political drama and scuffles in the parliament on Friday, the annual budget finally saw the light of day on Saturday. Behind schedule by four months, the country is relieved to have the budget whose major priorities are infrastructure, health, education and the private sector. 

More than content, the private sector and common people largely are happy to see the budget. This feeling was echoed on Saturday by economists and private sector leaders who are usually critical of the budget. “The fact that the budget has come is in itself an achievement,” said Binod Chaudhary, president of Confederation of Nepalese Industries.

The budget presented with only eight months of the fiscal year left may not make a big impact on the economy, but it has surely ended the anxiety of civil servants about not getting their salaries. Political compromise among the three major parties has left the budget handicapped with the Finance Ministry compelled to give continuity to major programmes of last year. The main spirit of compromise for the budget was to give continuity to development activities. Thus, the budget has new projects and programmes assisted by donors only.

Hence, there was no major policy announcement in the budget. This also saved the budget from being dubbed ‘populist’.

Budget makers must be lauded for giving emphasis on infrastructure. The focus on expanding highways to six lanes in Kathmandu and major international trade routes joining border Indian towns is expected to ease supply bottlenecks.

The budget has tried to address the looming crisis of the economy through policy intervention and incentives. Criticised for becoming revenue-oriented, the government has focused more on manufacturing sector. Such a measure is expected to boost the ailing export-sector via incentives.

The budget brought at a difficult time has tried to bring policy measures for positive results. To maintain fiscal discipline, it has announced that transfer of budget allocated to Far and Mid-Western region to other regions will be prohibited. Compulsory e-bidding for contracts worth more than Rs 2 billion is expected to make a positive impact.

Allowing Non Resident Nepalis (NRNs) to invest in the domestic capital market, regulating the commodity market and setting up credit rating agencies are some new measures in the budget to boost the capital market.  

The budget has disappointed the middle class as it has nothing to offer to it. Unlike the previous budget, this one doesn’t have income tax measures for the salaried class. On the other hand, it seeks to bring the middle class in the tax net by making it have permanent account number.

The biggest drawback of the budget is that its presentation has deepened political polarisation. This will surely affect the implementation aspect. Pro-Maoist economists have criticised the government for bringing the budget through ordinance.

Will Maoists allow the budget to be passed in the parliament and will programmes be implemented at the local level are major concerns. Hence, the situation calls for consensus among the political leadership to take the economy ahead.

A trip to Anna purna III

THE path is wide, the terrain easy, yet I keep losing my footing, tripping over stones and my own feet because I can’t watch the trail. My eyes refuse to leave the White Mountain filling the sky before me, the 24,786-foot Himalayan peak Annapurna III. It dominates the horizon as surely as a sunset does, but with millenniums-old glaciers ringing its crest like a necklace of diamonds, it feels more dazzling than even the brightest setting sun.

Skip to next paragraph

Interactive Map

Hiking the Annapurna Circuit

Enlarge This Image

Ethan-Todras Whitehill for The New York Times

In the Kali Gandaki Valley. In recent years, a road has been built along the river.

Just over a third of the way through the legendary 150-mile Annapurna Circuit trek, circling the Annapurna massif in Nepal, I have finally reached a height where no smaller mountains obscure my sightlines to the peaks. Ahead, four days on, lies Thorong La, a daunting 17,769-foot pass, the high point of the circuit and start of the trail back down. But I’ve already reached euphoria. Annapurna III is too everything — tall, close, imposing, beautiful — to be true.

Everyone who’s been to Nepal tells you the Himalayas are big. But nobody prepared me for the reality of breathing hard at altitudes already near those of some Rocky Mountain peaks, only to see a mountain rise another full height of the Rockies above me.

If my fiancée, Jen, and I had driven this same route in a jeep, my memories now and forever after would be a blur of trees and far-off villages, the mountains beautiful but remote, hardly more vivid than those seen in nature documentaries or computer wallpaper. Instead, as we approach the base of Annapurna III after a week of walking, my head is swimming with images seen close up: swaying footbridges over thunderous gorges; rocky footpaths jammed with goats, donkeys and water buffalo; terraced rice paddies thrusting green shoots against the olive hillsides; narrow stone Gurung villages filled with shrieking children, chatty shopkeepers and the low hum of chanting monks seeping out of brightly colored Buddhist monasteries.

And the mountains. Day by day, we’ve hiked in the company of the Annapurnas, admiring them from a distance in their shifting costumes of sun and shadow, sighing each time they hid behind clouds and cheering when they emerged. They feel like our mountains, our friends. Our Annapurnas.

It is a shame, then, that by 2012 a road will have been built on this path, destroying this experience and, according to many, placing the last nail in the coffin of what was once the greatest trek on earth.

Many walks lay claim to the title of World’s Greatest Trek — the Milford Track in New Zealand, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Inca Trail in Peru are a few. But none of those are epics through valleys surrounded by five-mile-high peaks, staying every night in teahouses run by local villagers and stocked with good kitchens, cold beer and Snickers bars. The Annapurna Circuit marries natural grandeur, cultural immersion and relative luxury in a union found nowhere else.

The circuit is a tale of two river valleys: up the steep, lush Marsyangdi, then over the pass and down the wide, arid Kali Gandaki. But in recent years a road, usable by buses and four-wheel-drive jeep-like vehicles, was completed that runs up the Kali Gandaki to the base of the pass. On that side, most trekkers now opt to ride in the jeeps rather than walk in their dust, and as a result, the time needed to complete the circuit has shrunk from 17 days to 11. In the coming years, with the road now being built on the Marsyangdi side, the undeveloped portion of the trek will shrink again, to just four days.

Roads are the bane of trekkers, most of whom — myself included — want to visit places where only their own two feet can take them. On trekking blogs and message boards, purists are already mourning Annapurna’s demise. So when I walked the Annapurna Circuit this past October, I decided to test this trekking prejudice: with Jen, a guide and a porter, I would walk the 17-day trail, even if it meant mingling with jeeps, and find out first-hand if all the doomsaying was warranted.

Thorong La is the highest altitude reached by many trekkers in their lifetimes, a few hundred feet higher than Everest Base Camp and eclipsed on the popular-treks list only by Kilimanjaro’s 19,331 feet. October, after the usual monsoon months, is prime trekking season because it is typically the driest month.

For pretty much every trekker in Nepal, whether headed to Annapurna, Everest or any of the other fabulously scenic regions, the preparation starts in the Thamel neighborhood of Katmandu, where every third storefront overflows with knockoff trekking poles, nylon pants and packs at prices half to a third of those elsewhere. (Our guide, a 30-something, thin-mustached Gurkha, called it “Chinese North Face.”) Thamel has no sidewalks, so our every foray into its streets was a tooth-and-nail battle with rickshaws, cars and mopeds.

Anomalies every where

there is one proverb here in nepal "bigrya gharko bhakya chala". the proverb absolutely suits the condition of  the country. its been difficult to find the sector where there is not anomalies. it seems every single person in this country is corrupt.