Ben’s Blog

I had been wondering for a while where the minivans with the window-signage saying Rijarbha (रिजार्भ) were actually going. I hadn’t been able to find Rijarbha on any maps of Kathmandu and the minivans never seemed to stop to take on passengers.

(And as  anyone who knows the completely mercenary approach taken by most minivan drivers and conductors in the this fine city will tell you, that’s just odd. I’ve been one of a crowd of 27 people in a minivan that had seating capacity of 14…)

But for the first time today I worked out why they won’t stop for passengers. And why I’ll never get to find out where they are going. Because they are rijarbha. Just not rijarbha for me.

I think it was about February 1997 that my lovely wife Lyndall decreed that I was no longer allowed to watch ABC’s political opinion program, Insiders, on Sunday mornings anymore on the grounds that anytime former foreign Minister Alexander Downer featured my fairly vocal responses helped expand the vocabulary of our impressionable, then 4-year-old, Gabe, in ways that might have been hard to explain at his preschool.

But it seems that Downer is, once again, and for reasons completely opaque to me, deemed quoteworthy by Australian news media these days.

Most recently the Downer has weighed in on whether Prime Ministers should “be dumped” if the polls turn against them. Apparently he thinks that’s bad form.

I suppose he’s a little bit cranky that the ALP figured out how to do something the Libs couldn’t work up the guts to do in in 2007.

Yes, I’ve still been following Australian politics. And loving that we have our first ever redhead PM.

But the axing of a PM in Australia pales a little compared to the ongoing drama of defiance, ultimatums, machinations, inertia, occasional bomb blast, resignations and intrigue that characterises Nepal’s national governance at the moment. It’s a rampaging whirligig that ends up exactly where it began (quite possibly by not actually moving very far from that spot in the first place).

And if you thought local government was boring, spare a thought for Nepal’s Village Development Committee (VDC) Secretaries who not only suffer a legitimacy deficit as local elections have not been held since 2002, but now face death threats from a relatively unknown outfit, the Samyukta Jatiya Mukti Morcha (roughly, the United Ethnicities Liberation Front). At last count the VDC Secretaries in 10 of Nepal’s 75 districts had resigned because of these threats. Though in at least 2 districts they went back to work fairly promptly.

You know you totally want to. And you can do it here.

So, five weeks of come-again go-again diarrhoea, extreme tiredness, and generally being at feeling-really-crap’s door, is all the responsibility of a very small, hard-to-diagnose, algae.

When I told my 6 year-old what was living in my guts, he asked why it didn’t just find a lake to live in? It’s a good question, but I’ll mainline the killer antibiotics first and ask questions later.

I’m just back from my second trip to Rukum, in Nepal’s mid-Western hills. (My post on the first visit, “Dancing with Magars”, is here.)

My schedule said:

• advocacy training with partner NGOs; and
• time with staff discussing ways to help empower communities and build more accountable and responsive local governance.

But Rukum likes to put me in interesting situations. This time I was invited off the street to observe, “just for a minute”, a cross-party program launching a campaign against caste-based discrimination and untouchability.

Though explicitly prohibited by law and Nepal’s Interim Constitution, the group of people known as dalits (which means “the oppressed”) still face the stigma and exclusion of untouchability on the basis of their status in the Hindu caste system. (Or at least in the prevailing interpretation of the Hindu caste system.) For some it means that they will never be invited into the home of a higher-caste person, or that no higher-caste person will accept a drink from their hand. It can mean exclusion from and under-representation in schooling, administrative positions and the like. It can mean being locked into a traditional caste-based occupation such as tool-making, tailoring, and so on, with few opportunities to develop new skills and techniques to compete against cheap imports. It can mean being bound in a form of peonage, serving one or more families in exchange for food and small items, rather than wages, in an arrangement that can last generations.

So, bad on pretty much every level. Socially, economically, psycho-socially, politically… just bad.

I was interested to observe the event and my Nepali is up to following a large part of what people say as long as there’s not too much unfamiliar vocab and the speaker doesn’t talk too fast. (Though, on reflection, these conditions were unlikely to have been met at a political event.) However, my chances of remaining an observer started diminishing rapidly when the event organiser came over to ask my name, organisation, and country of origin… Then another chair was placed up on the stage among the invited guests and speakers… Then I was asked (in Nepali) if I would say a few words about the issue and about conditions in my country…

Polite refusals having accomplished precisely nothing I sat on stage ransacking my Nepali vocab and grammar to see what I could say about caste-based discrimination. And managed to give a 3 or 4 minute speech that went something like:

I’m sorry to tell you that there is discrimination in my country, Australia. Sometimes the rich look down on the poor. Sometimes white people discriminate against people with dark skin. Sometimes there is even violence. So there is discrimination. But there is no untouchability. Anyone can take water from the hand of another. Anyone can enter the home of another if invited.*

Caste-based discrimination needs to end in Nepal. If people’s rights are not respected, if caste-based discrimination still exists, then Nepal will not develop.

So, seeing this campaign, I am very happy and supportive. I wish you success in your actions against untouchability. I hope that together you can change society.

*These two lines about receiving water and being welcome in another’s home were greeted with applause. And, Australia, you came off pretty well in the speech, mostly because I don’t know the words for racism, xenophobia and mistreatment of asylum-seekers.

Our littlest guy Jacob is extraordinarily fond of learning through song and is happy to request or demand a song for pretty much any object or situation he encounters. Some of his requests are pretty easy to fill from the standard nursery rhyme and children song repertoire – “Frog song?” “Bus song?” “Lamb song?” (Though, admittedly, he did have to wait until the final word of “Hey Diddle Diddle” to get the payoff on his request for a “spoon song”.)

Others, though, are a little trickier –”Panda song?” “Umbrella song?” “Water truck with the pipes song?”

So we’re getting pretty good at improvising. But I was a bit surprised that I couldn’t call to mind any songs to fit the following requests:

• elephant,
• kite,
• big mountains,
• rocket.

Are there really not any or was I deprived of a crackingly good elephant song in my own childhood?

I really didn’t expect that the oldest woman I have yet met and tallest man I have yet seen would be encountered here in Nepal.

But in my recent visit to one of UMN’s offices in Nepal’s south-east I got to meet my friend Kchitiz’ grandmother – who has just clocked up 100 years and still collects water, weeds in the garden, and gets out and about on her farm in Jhapa District.

In neighbouring Morang District lives a man who is 7’9″. He looked even more uncomfortable in a rickshaw than I do, I’m sure.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of local governance in poverty reduction. It’s street-level bureaucrats and administrators who implement policy (and who interpret how it should be implemented in their area). They are the ones who manage funds for local development priorities. So, improving the responsiveness of local administration to the priorities and needs of poor and marginalised communities is an integral part of the approach UMN takes to address the root causes of poverty.

Nepal has excellent laws governing its planning and budgeting. The local self governance act (1999) lays out the framework for development of annual plans and budgets from the local to the national level. It is – in theory, at least – very participatory and inclusive. And hence it goes by the name participatory planning process. The law itself needs some updating in light of the changed political situation in Nepal since it was drafted (and the upcoming change that will be brought about by the new Constitution – due to be completed by the end of May) but the process it outlines still works.

According to this process, every local settlement (village or hamlet) has the right to develop a plan, or a set of prioritised and agreed projects, that must be considered at the ward level – the next highest level of local administration. Plans/projects prioritised at the ward level must be considered at the Village Development Committee – an administrative area that generally comprises 9  wards.

The VDC generally has its own resources (as well as those given from central government funds) so when a project reaches the VDC, it can either be approved and funded directly, or incorporated into the VDC’s own submission to the District level plan for consideration. And so on, up the chain. With provision for inclusive and transparent decision-making processes at every step.

Settlement
↓
Ward
↓
Village Development Council
↓
District Development Council
↓
Central government

But, of course, the theory of participation and inclusion isn’t always lived out in practice. Very often, communities don’t contribute to the planning process because they are not aware of their rights, or the plans are developed by self-selected groups of politically influential people at the VDC or District level without regard to what communities might want. To its credit, Nepal’s Ministry of Local Development has a program to improve the functioning of the participatory planning process – by improving its understanding and use by administrators (supply-side improvement) and by improving community awareness of and involvement in the process (demand-side improvement).

And NGOs can play a crucial role in this. In the last few months, UMN’s team in Doti District – in Nepal’s Far Western Development region piloted a set of community education materials to raise awareness and increase involvement in the participatory planning process. The outcome was startling and encouraging.

Every community that we worked with reported that either 1) they were not aware of the process or 2) they had never participated before. So the District plan from Doti this year will incorporate submissions from communities who have never before given voice to their needs and priorities in this way. From the 8 wards we worked in, 2 plans were selected for direct funding from the VDC’s own budget and 14 other plans from local settlements were submitted for consideration in the District plan.

So, we’ve definitely seen increased community understanding and involvement in the process. The next things we need to determine are: 1) how fairly are all the submissions treated at each stage in the process and how effectively are communities able to monitor this and 2) what impact will implementation of these plans have on the well-being of poor and marginalised communities?

Stay tuned.

This is an update to a previous post about access to water in Dhading District.

Short summary of the previous post:

1) 35 years ago a Kumal community built an irrigation channel. (Kumals are one of Nepal’s ethnic minorities and generally experience worse health, education and economic outcomes than Nepal’s average – and being at the average in Nepal is no great place to be).

2) Five years later a high-caste community built an irrigation channel in a way that diverted all the water away from the Kumal’s channel. This was not legal at the time, but there you go.

3) In the last 2 years the Kumals and a local NGO network have tried many things to get fair and secure access to water for irrigation:

• They engaged in countless meetings and dialogues to bring about reconciliation and a fair agreement between the two communities. Of course, the community with all the water was happy to talk endlessly with the community with none of the water. So these meetings didn’t achieve very much.
• They established a users committee to organise the community. This committee was highjacked by the high-caste community who managed to get one of their own members elected to the Kumal’s own committee.
• They spoke with the media about the situation. But after the brief discomfort brought about by the public attention had faded, the high-caste community went right back to ignoring the water sharing agreement they had come to.

Since then, though, the Kumals have continued to organise and take action. They took their case to the District’s Chief Development Officer and called on him to take action. In response to their lobbying, the CDO sent a team of engineers from the water ministry to visit the site and survey the two channels. Both communities were also asked to give an account of the amount of land in each place.

The Kumals hope that this information will be used to determine a fair allocation of water to each community and guide the engineers when they come to rebuild the two channels. Let’s hope that’s how it works. There are several ways that the Kumals could still be denied justice. The land tallies might be inaccurate or misrepresented. The work on the channels might be delayed. Or it might be done without proper regard to the communities’ needs.

But by continuing to speak up the Kumals are paving the way for change. Not only a change in the irrigation infrastructure available in the village. Nor only the nutrition and health benefits that will come when the water is available. Also a change in the Kumals’ own self-understanding and perception of their place in the world.