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Areas Finance Minister Bhattarai Going to Fail
BY KTM Metro Reporter in Kathmandu
The recent news in the Nepalese media has it that Nepalese Finance Minister Dr. Baburam Bhattarai vowed to introduce socialism in Nepal; he did not define what socialism means. If he means providing social security to Nepalis then he should study what and how social securities are provided in the so-called capitalist countries, if he means the state control on everything then his party and he would fail disastrously.
On Thursday, November 6, 2008, Finance Minister Dr. Baburam Bhattarai said that the education and heath sectors were the areas of the government so the private sector needed to move away from these two sectors to other sectors. Here again, the Finance Minster failed in understanding what results would bring in by the government monopoly on these sectors. None would disagree with the Finance Minister on the need for providing the weaker sections of Nepalis with concessionary education and health services but denying the private sectors to invest in these two sectors means denying Nepalis to the access to the education and health services of their choice. If he was really for providing quality health services to Nepalis he could have already done so in the state-owned hospitals but nothing had happened even after more than two months of taking the power in his hands.
His next area of failure would be introducing the need for disclosure of earnings for buying anything worth more than rupees three millions. Previous governments also had attempted to introduce such things but failed in it. So, Finance Minister Dr. Bhattarai would not be an exception; he is bound to fail in this adventure, too. First of all, billions if not more rupees would be fly away from Nepal. His call on industrialists and businessmen for investing in Nepal would be nothing but failure.
Finance Minister’s recently disclosed mantras have shown that he has deliberately ignored his initial mantra of ‘public-private partnership’ for development. If it were so, then Dr. Baburam Bhattarai would be the most failed Finance Minister after his predecessor Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat.
