The cholera outbreak is fading from the headlines. Those who died are now just statistics. The country awaits the next disaster, and when it happens the media will unleash a flashflood of coverage, everyone will hurl blame at each other, and an unresponsive state will fumble again.
It is hard to remember a time when there was such a wide gap between what the country and its people urgently need and the petty preoccupations of those who rule it. The peace process has got bogged down and development is at a standstill because of the political stalemate. The rhetoric of our leaders is getting shriller as they run each other down ad nauseum.
There is lots that needs to be done. We have to make up for the decade we lost due to the war, and we have to address the poverty, inequality and exclusion that led to that conflict in the first place. We have to meet an acute food crisis this winter and at the same time address the longer-term need for food security, education, health care, energy, jobs of a population of 40 million by 2020.
Call it a volcano, a time bomb or whatever you like. Yet, weut you see neither the awareness nor an effort to formulate a strategy to deal with this unfolding calamity at decision-taking and policy-making levels. Those of us attending the launch of the Nepal Human Development Report 2009 at the plush ball room of the Crowne Plaza the other day hung our heads in shame. Nepal has the lowest life-expectancy of any country in South Asia, our maternal and infant mortality in pockets of the mid-west are at sub-Saharan levels.
It's not that there hasn't been progress. In fact, despite the war our overall development parameters will meet most of the UN's Milennium Development Goals by 2015. But this advance has been uneven and unequal. Only 35 per cent of Dalit women are literate, compared to 70 per cent among Bahun/Chhetri females. The trans-Karnali lags behind in all indicators. The eastern Tarai has a Human Development Index almost as bad as the remote northwestern mountains. The Jajarkot epidemic showed a disproportionate number of those who died and were hospitalised were Dalits.
Even natural disasters in this country are manmade, and the poor suffer more: landless settlements along vulnerable flood plains, crowded tenements that flout seismic codes, droughts that lead to health epidemics because of the lack of clean drinking water.
The next big calamity is not a question of 'if', but "when". As Jajarkot showed this year and Kosi last year, we are not prepared. In the short-term, a rapid response system with heavy-lift helicopters is long-overdue.
For the future, however, there is really no other option but to raise the capacity of every Nepali family to cope: with education, jobs, food self-sufficiency and health care. It's not too much to ask, and it can be done with better governance and if we muster the political will.
