The National Planning Commission has begun shuffling paper in the run-up to the 10th five-year Plan, which comes into effect from mid-July 2002. Until 1990, the National Planning Commission was a powerful coordinator of development activity and government policy, based on five-yearly planning cycles since the 1950s. Its role in development planning has been fuzzy since, but the five-year plans are still around.

According to the approach paper to the 10th plan, (available in a read-only, unprintable form at www.npc.gov.np) the goal is to achieve an average annual growth rate of 6.5 percent, against the three yearly averages of 5.3 percent since 1997/98. This would require achieving 4.2 percent growth in agriculture-against the 3.17 percent average of the past four years-and 8 percent growth in the non-agriculture sector, up from the present average of about 6.3 percent. The overall goal of the plan is to expand employment opportunities to reduce the number of people in absolute poverty from the present 38 percent of the population to 32 percent at the end of the 10th plan. The numbers look good, but going by the NPC's past record they may also be difficult to achieve without a major overhaul of the planning, implementation and governance processes. Some other goals:

. Reduce infant mortality from 75 per 1,000 to 50.7 and maternal mortality from 435 per 100,000 to 350
. Expand primary education coverage from 70.5 to 85 percent
. Raise adult literacy (15 years and above) from 53 to 70 percent
. Raise female literacy from 26 to 50 percent, and
. l Keep population growth rate at 2.1 percent, against the present 2.4

The plan also envisages building motorable road links to 70 districts, up from the 58 that are currently connected-even though some of these roads are not black-topped-and take telephone connections to every 50 lines per 1,000 people from the present 11. The coverage of electricity is to be increased by seven percent to reach 22 percent of the population. The fixed capital investment needed to achieve the five-year goal is Rs 689.5 billion-almost seven times the money budgeted for spending in fiscal 2001/01.