So it goes

Delay over reconstruction

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The post-earthquake response of the previous Sushil Koirala government was woeful. That of the government of KP Sharma Oli, which has now been in office for three months, has been no better. It took the parliament eight months after the devastating earthquakes back in April, 2015 to pass the bill for the formation of the National Reconstruction Authority. On Christmas day the authority finally got its CEO. Yet the new chief says it might take four more months for the task of reconstruction and rehabilitation to start in earnest. According to Sushil Gyanwali, not even initial identification of earthquake victims has been completed. Likewise, there can be no reconstruction, said Gyanwali, unless they first prepare a detailed damage assessment report. This state of complete inaction gives an indication of the breathtaking neglect of around 600,000 earthquake victims who have lived, for eight long months, in makeshift shelters that leak water and provide no protection against the cold. Successive governments callously neglected their plight despite repeatedly being directed by the parliament to hurry up.

On Sunday, too, the parliament’s Development Committee excoriated various ministries for their failure to carry out its previous instructions. For instance the committee had as early as May 8th directed the Ministry of Local Development and Federal Affairs to prepare an action plan for reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure. Nothing happened. Then on June 16th it had asked the government to immediately start reconstructing historic and cultural sites. Nearly seven months later, the government is finally preparing to start rebuilding historic sites with the Balgopaleswor temple at Ranipokhari. But as it prepares to do so, it is yet to work out preliminary estimate of the cost involved. Getting the country back up on its feet after the devastating earthquakes last year has clearly not been a government priority. The four major parties signed the historic 16-point agreement back in June so that the country could soon have a constitution and rebuilding works would speed up. But the political agreement does not seem to have made much of a difference on post-quake efforts, one way or the other.

It is now clear that the country will witness a level of political instability for years to come. The danger is that politicians will in this climate of uncertainty keep finding new excuses not to get on with reconstruction. But national politics should not have in any way hampered post-quake efforts. There was a cross-party consensus, including the Madheshi parties, that rebuilding the devastated country should be a top priority and political calculations should not get in the way. So where did it all go wrong? The way we see it, our politicians have no sense of accountability towards the people. They will continue to pursue their pre-set partisan goals, even if the rest of the country is going to hell. In the process they will conveniently ignore court directives and parliament fiats with no one to hold them to account. How earthquake victims will survive for the next four months in their rickety shelters, surely, is none of their business.