Kathmandu, April 10:In a two-day seminar on “NGOs, Civil Society and Government” organised to examine their roles and responsibilities the participants and paper presenters criticised the non-government sector for failing to meet the public expectations and perform desired role in national development endeavour. The seminar is jointly by Central Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Tribhuvan University (CDSA-TU) and Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung.
Presenting his working paper on Problems and Prospects of Relationship between the Government Organisation and NGOs/INGOs Prof. Dilli Ram Dahal said that the organisations have failed to deliver desired results for Nepal’s social and economic development. He also pointed out that crisis of trust for each other between government and non-government organisations and negative implications brought forth by it.
Prof. Dahal claimed that emergence of NGOs in Nepal is systematically linked with flow of “easy money” in forms of bilateral and multilateral aids and grants from donor countries specially after the restoration of multi-party system in 1990. He criticised the donor agencies working in Nepal for making Nepal the “field laboratory” for testing their untested development models. He further criticised the non-government sector in Nepal of “creating a parallel government structure” in their working domain, damaging the working ethics of government employees by providing high salaries and other benefits to their employees, undermining government’s capability or programmes by entering agreements directly with donor agencies. He further claimed that NGOs in Nepal are formed and controlled by small elite groups, are politically motivated and have high operational costs.
On the second paper presented today, Bihari Krishna Shrestha noted that control of political power by a small group of village elite has resulted in dearth of sense of accountability in elected leaders and government’s development allocations are more or less exclusively available to the rich and powerful only. He also claimed that development works are planned, executed and managed by the beneficiaries traditionally, but the recent government tampering with such community-managed assets has resulted in permanent closure of community initiated infrastructures. He further pointed out that conflict of interest between the community’s good and vested political interest of village leaders and mindlessness of donors and government to respect the value of traditional community-based collective efforts has damaged traditional self-help system.
Dr. Tika Pokharel of Social Welfare Council said that the government is firm to develop cordial relationship with non-government sector to speed up the development process in Nepal. He said that lack intellectual debates on prospective roles and responsibilities and contributions and misdeeds of NGOs, lack of proper mechanism to regulate their performances and political instability attracted criticism against the NGOs. However, he expressed his confidence that the non-government sector is capable of becoming the third social force that would help the country achieve its development goals.
The main objectives of the seminar organised on initiations of final year students of CDSA-TU to engage NGO professionals, government’s policy makers, academics and graduate students on debate about the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats of NGO movement in Nepal. And, to disseminate the information generated from the seminar to the graduate students and Nepalese public for a healthy debate on the role of NGOs in the development of Nepal.
The MA second year students have already successfully organised six Student initiated Lecture Series on NGOs.