Indeed, over a decade ago, the parliament had enacted the Nepal Engineering Council (NEC) Act to establish a statutory body for the engineering profession. The NEC body was “intended to make the engineering profession effective in Nepal and mobilize it in a systematic and scientific manner as well as to provide for, among other matters, the registration of the names of engineers as per their qualification.” Sadly, despite the passage of a dozen years since promulgation, the only tangible outcome of the Act is an expanding register of engineers without any thought for the realization of the primary intention of the Act i.e. the effectiveness of the engineering profession. Had this Act indeed been as effective as intended, the unpleasant task of judging whether the above types of cases were engineering misdemeanours or instances of plain corruption would have been the domain of the ethics/disciplinary committee of the Council and the honourable members of the PAC could have been spared the disgrace of listening to counter-accusations of unnecessary meddling in technical matters by those accused. They would have appeared much saner and tidier pecking the Council to do the needful instead.
In Nepal, many engineering debacles, some with lasting soreness, have been witnessed in the past decade, but not in one instance has the NEC ever been found exercising its mandate. The collapse of a structure at Manipal Medical College some years ago that killed many innocents, questionable quality of NT mobile services, or say the present load-shedding scenario, are clearly engineering matters that ought to have been directly investigated by the NEC. A plain question as to how the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA), the sole utility provider, can breezingly get by with connecting additional load to the grid without any thoughts for augmenting generation smacks of plain incompetence.
Every single shopping-mall springing up in Kathmandu puts an additional hundreds of kilowatts of load on the already straining grid. How can the NEA connect this load without ensuring accompanying additional generation capacity, as it is certain to worsen the quality of service to its existing customers, especially during the coming dry months? As a parallel, would the Nepal Medical Council, a statutory body for doctors, citing lack of certain drugs in the country, allow doctors to prescribe under-dosage antibiotics to patients in the name of distributing the available limited stocks to all infected, in a possible instance of a killer epidemic, without worrying for the emergence of possible drug-resistant strains of the pathogen?
Such unacceptable actions in the engineering profession continue to go unchecked simply because the NEC has failed to step up to the mantle and shoulder its statutory responsibility, almost certainly owing to the incompetence of its office bearers and the prevailing conflict of interest.
Undoubtedly, engineering graduates are employed in almost all walks of life in Nepal. But does a Bachelor’s Degree in engineering alone equip the bright minds with the necessary capabilities to absorb and assimilate the technologies they have to work with at their workplaces? If some engineers at Nepal Police indeed were involved in the procurement process of the APCs, was it professional on their part to write the specifications and evaluate the proposals on something that they most probably never had any hands on experience? Certainly not, and nor was it wise on the part of the higher-ups to hand down such specialized tasks that require more than basic knowledge provided by mechanical engineering education.
Public procurement involves procurement of goods, services and works by public sector offices under contract. While procuring technical goods and works, citing lack of expertise with the public office, often a consultant is appointed to supervise the execution of the contract. Sometimes, even services are procured for the very preparation of bid document citing similar reasons and there is no satisfactory way of verifying the document’s soundness for the very same reason. Such cases, where the contractor and the consultant are both from outside the public office, who else in the scenario could be expected to capably look after the lasting interests of the public office that has ordered the services?
The consultant is usually nestled safely outside the ambit of prevailing legal provisions of the public office and usually has not much at stake in terms of collateral as compared to the cost of the main contract. The public office is then left entirely at the mercy of the judgment of the consultant and is confined to merrily writing payment cheques. Where are the checks and balances in this system to ensure that any malafide intention does not get through? Well, then, how reasonable is it to expect that in this prevailing environment public offices will always receive quality works or services?
The NEC must have been reconstituted at least thrice since its existence. However, neither a single amendment has been achieved in its Act given the limitations of its purview and nor has any regulation been promulgated to uphold the current standards of engineering to that taught in engineering textbooks. How else should one judge the level of civil engineering in Nepal when the ever-rising level of road surfaces by repeated overlays has resulted in its surface above that of the footpaths on the sides, which earlier were inches above the road surface? How were such comical plans approved, and executed? By non-engineers or by engineers looking the other way? It is high time the parliament and the PAC hold the NEC accountable for dereliction of duty and make it do the necessary dirty work by appropriate punitive actions to ensure a cleaner and leaner register at the Council.
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