| Username |
Post |
| ashu |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 02:25 AM
In Nepal, we Nepalis have a spent a fortune to keep this country in poverty.
I cite one example.
In Nepal, for some time, I have been meeting a whole gang of Nepali consultants (interestingly with degrees from land-grant places like Michigan State, Iowa State, Wisconsin and so on) and who -- now in their 40s and 50s -- specialize on, well, finding cures to Nepal's various development problems.
They usually have either a one-man or a husband-and-wife consulting firm somewhere. They speak good English, can banter easily and come across as
all polished and all that. (For reasons perplexing to me: Wives of these
consultants are usually very glamorous -- a cross, after adjusted for age, between some Zee TV female game-show host and your
America-returned sister.)
Usually, these are NOT people with expertise in technical disciplines, but people with all-purpose plug-anywhere-and-apply degrees such as urban planning, economic development, public policy and so on.
The way this whole thing works is like this: A donor, say the World Bank or UNDP or whoever else, launches some Project A.
That Project A requires a whole gaggle of consultants to do all kinds of relevant and not-so-relevant studies. And these Nepali development consultants get
hired for short-term gigs at high prices. Usually they have contacts at these
development agencies, and their names keep on popping up for any such
consultancies.
So the donor pays these consultants -- quite well, lakhs and lakhs of rupees and all that -- after they submit their whatever findings.
Never mind that most of their reports are hopelessly khattam and half-assed and devoid of any critical scrutiny, but, hey, donors too have to disburse their money and this game gets played again and again.
So, here's this a demand for development consultants; and there's this supply
of them.
All fine and good.
So far.
Now here is where this whole gets interesting.
Some of these consultants are NOT content to be anonymous hacks laboring for some donor agencies. They also want to maintain their "independent" stance. And what do they do?
They write articles in the Kathmandu Post deeply pontificating about Nepal's problems. They organize and attend soporific workshops at Blue Star or Himalaya or Orchid on some of the most boring development issues with all the seriousness of a pundit performing the sraddha of his father.
And who do these consultants blame for Nepal ko dur.gati? They blame the donors, they blame the government, and they blame everybody else but themselves.
Little do they realize that without Nepal's poor and marginalized in whose name they make all that money, they would be totally unemployable.
Finally,a disclosure: Now that that hugely-funded BPEP (Basic and primary Education project) shit has hit the fan, it is with great fascination (but with NO other professional or personal motives) that I am watching the ways with which development consultants like Bihari Krishna Shresta et all are struggling
to defend themselves against charges of basically looting millions of
rupees.
Bihari Krishna Shrestha, let it be said, also leads an inspirational double life as a critic of Nepali rate of bikas, and he peddles the ususal answers: poverty, bad governance, bad netas and all that.
Sometimes one wonder: You stay in Nepal for too long, and won't all this corruption and dishonesty around you also make you succumb to such double-dealing? And if so, is there also a time to leave Nepal for good, to seek professional challenges elsewhere in the raw private sector? You wonder
and you wonder.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 02:42 AM
Again, having been there and done that, not many could have summarised the sorry state better. Thanks Ashu.
Re. your last question, based on experience, that's when you go to grad school, start looking for a wife like a mad man, and be amused constantly by laughing at the world and one-self :)
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 02:55 AM
and forgot to add...can you please let me know when some of those wives you describe are...you know...ummm...sort of...kind of...available in the contractual sense of the word? :)
sorry, friday afternoon blues.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 03:20 AM
Well, Paschim,
To tell you the truth, at parties, one strategy is to walk up to these women (who will invariably be holding a red-wine ko glass), flash your Everest toothpaste smile, flutter your eye-lashes, and mention -- by way of a conversation in about 5 minutes after introduction and do so oh-so-nonchalantly -- that you did spend some time in Boston attending a certain such-and-such place. :-)
You can see their eyes light up, their faces beaming, and they and their
husbands are immediatly interested in you as a person.
So much so that and some of them even try to immediately recruit you to serve as a guidance counselor or a godfather for their applying-to-Harvard-in-year-2010 son or daughter (who, by the way, will turn out to be some dull, pampered
demon attending schools like Rato Bangala, St. Xavier's or Little Angels).
The recruitment usually starts out with a dinner invitation and, I suppose, it's
up to you how you wish to play the Mrs. Robinson thing, if you are so inclined :-)
The middle- to upper-middle class sections of Kathmandu are endlessly
fascinating!!
OK, Friday afternoon ko boredom, indeed.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 03:33 AM
Hmmm...informed by experience, eh, Ashu "Dustin" Tiwari? :)
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| ashu |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 06:19 AM
Paschim: As a line of some poem goes: "Imagination gains you experiences that experience cannot imagine"
That said, this thread is supposed to be about development consultants and
not necessarily about their glamorous wives. But digression is always
pleasant :-)
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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| body hammer |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 12:20 PM
But then wives are in the thick and thin of it all. That we want hot and glamorous wives, who want to best her friends and make them jealous, and that we want to show them off do we want the money that came into the country and was meant for development is being used to self promote by all the people around you who have good looking glamorous wives. Kind of sucks to be the one walking around with a drink in your hand, talking about high ideals in a state of mind where the air is thin and neither the mascara laden babes nor the beer bellied compadres can breathe easily that you find yourself in a self described intellectual minority. While the gravity defying erection, seeking to sow its oats, hones on its targets and leads you by the nose. That you fall into the spell of a batted eyelash then you see that it is not so bad to have a belly full and a warmbody beside you and the price you pay is a slight dilution of your ideals which really is not all your fault because in a fight between the institution and the single man you really cannot do much by yourself because the corruption is so ingrained and the culture is so contrary. so you sip your gin and puff your smoke and then realize that you have somehow slipped out of the vaudeville but then guilty pangs are the way of life and hey...did that babe just flash me a smile. Don't you loive that rush? and lo and behold you are back into the game and leave streams of consciousness like this for another time
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| ashu |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 09:13 PM
For the moment, let's just say that I am amused by these consultants and their glamorous wives.
I don't know what to make of them only when they lead verifiably double lives to the point where they are unrecognizable: such as privately working as a highly-paid World Bank consultant on some water project on one hand, AND around the same time trying to come across as an independent thinker/NGO activist in public by criticizing the global aid industry and all that. Of course, don't count on them to disclose their own ties to the aid industry.
I don't know: Maybe when you are 45 years old in Nepal, and have a wife and kids to support, and are used to or aspire to middle- to upper-middle class life, and the private sector is not so great, then, you know, maybe doing the above becomes
a survival strategy for you.
If so, yes, then you would want Nepal to remain poor because that's the only way you can get rich by churning out these 100s of "povery reduction" reports for handsome fees that pays your kids' Rato Bangala fees. And you would churn out these reports because you know that you are unemployable when it comes to doing other things OUTSIDE of the aid industry.
Anyway, just my thoughts re: how good, passionate young people in Nepal get sucked in this vortex of "development" only to sell their souls and compromis on their ideals. Not that this does not happen elsewhere too . . .
oohi
"in a reflective mood"
ashu
ktm,nepal
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| Nomad |
Posted
on 29-Mar-02 10:53 PM
>Usually, these are NOT people with expertise in technical disciplines, but people >with all-purpose plug-anywhere-and-apply degrees such as urban planning, >economic development, public policy and so on.
I find above your comment troubling because I happen to be one of the "economic development, public policy" type (in college, at the moment), but one that is critical of things and certainly doesn't want to be one of your chameleon consultants. Having tried all sorts of disciplines, I have liked development and want to pursue it further. And I do see myself working as some sort of a "consultant", thinking and writing, talking about development. But if what you're describing is where I'll end up, I'll really have to rethink things.
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| Biswo |
Posted
on 30-Mar-02 12:28 PM
A great thread I missed for hours. Consultants demystified! And the 'graduate'
talking about his life so fascinatingly! This is ,however, the first time I have found
our irrepressible, indefatiguable Ashu being somehow pessimistic. May be it is
when you go to grad school!
Here is this dude who I knew directed this primary education program and siphoned
off millions to (where else?) his own pockets, changing his rustic son to long-hair
loving, marijuana seeking hippy in the process, I have heard. The guy PhD'ed
from one university in Scotland, in some vague topic like education ko mahatwa in
Nepal, went back to Nepal to find his old time friend Govinda Raj Joshi becoming
minister of education and resigned from his Bharatpur's Birendra Campus's job to
become primary education project's director. Dr Tirtha Raj Khaniya is now
rumoured to be trying his luck in politics from Chitwan Area no 2, and is pouring in
his money to Congressi committees. Did I hope anything from these people
regarding education of kids in Nepal? No. That money, dear Ashu, was probably
destined to be embezzled from the start. Sorry for those kids in places like
Sankhuwasabhaa whose life was gambled in the process.
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| readerOfTheLostArc |
Posted
on 30-Mar-02 10:13 PM
This article is a must read.
Its last paragraph is an astounding result about foreign aid.
From Times Of India.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Articleshow.asp?art_id=5401046
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