KATHMANDU, Oct 24: Prime Minister KP Oli presented before the people the major accomplishments achieved by his government over the past 100 days, on Wednesday. The major portion of his speech was clad in stark contrast to the day-to-day reality facing the country and the common citizenry.
PM Oli claimed that the economy was in the doldrums when he took the reins of the government but has shown signs of recovery since then. He argued that the formation of the high-level Economic Sector Recommendation Commission has boosted the confidence of the private sector.
“As a result of the boosted confidence, 200 industries have committed around Rs 34 billion in investments in the last 100 days,” he said. However, Economist Ram Prasad Gyawali cited the lack of utilization of subsidized loans from the government by the private sector to argue that the private sector is far from revitalized.
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During the honeymoon period of the government, the country faced 7,135 catastrophic events due to natural disasters, which caused significant economic losses. The Prime Minister who was away attending the United Nations General Assembly during the recent disaster incidents, neither rushed back to take charge of the search and rescue operations nor did he achieve any significant feat at the assembly.
As per Political Analyst Chandra Dev Bhatta, the PM neither properly emphasized the issue of climate justice at the assembly nor garnered any new commitments from foreign partners during the 100-day period.
PM Oli said in his speech that a total of 391 individuals lost their lives in floods and landslides during his current tenure. Although relief payments of Rs 200,000 each were provided to the families of those individuals, and Rs 430 million allocated to 71 local areas hit by crises, heavily-affected districts have demanded additional financial assistance from the federal government.
The Lalitpur district chapter of Oli’s party CPN-UML, requested Rs 3 billion for reconstruction following the floods of September 27-28. The requested amount for one district is seven times the relief amount the federal government has allocated for 71 local units.
PM Oli took pride in claiming that although previous governments had only officially declared to celebrate the Constitution Day as the National Day, the current government finally marked the transition into celebrating the occasion as the National Day by hosting the “National Day Concert” at Durbarmarg on September 19.
“With the efforts of the government, the Constitution Day has been celebrated in a festive and cheerful manner with wide public participation for the first time,” he said. Ironically, multiple concert-goers were arrested from the venue on the same evening as they chanted slogans supporting Kathmandu Metropolitan City mayor Balen Shah, in a move that legal experts described as an infringement of freedom of expression guaranteed by the constitution.
As per PM Oli, the government responded effectively to the recent disaster incidents. He claimed that the reopening of the roads leading to the capital and resumption of traffic on the BP Highway helped about 814,246 people to leave Kathmandu for Dashain celebrations. What PM Oli carefully excluded from the speech was that the number of people exiting the valley for celebration is down to 60 percent from last year’s total of 1.3 million. In addition, although the BP Highway has been open for vehicular movement, it is vulnerable to more accidents due to its perilous condition as many road sections on the highway are still under reconstruction.
