PPP best model for Nepal: PM Dahal

KATHMANDU, Oct 23 - Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal on Tuesday said that public-private partnership (PPP) is the best model for economic development in the country. "We want to create a new model for economic development," the prime minister said while addressing the inaugural ceremony of a two-day National Symposium ...

Public-private partnership is an arrangement between the government and the private sector by which services that are traditionally the responsibility of government are provided by the private sector under terms and conditions agreed upon beforehand.

In his welcoming remarks, President of the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry Kush Kumar Joshi said that such partnerships could be developed in education, health, telecommunications, energy, infrastructure, tourism and agricultural sectors.

Joshi said the symposium will pave the way for preparation of a clear-cut policy vision to speed up PPP.

Even with political changes, little has changed in the daily lives of the people; there is therefore a need to create an environment where everyone feels the change and for this a new system of economic development is needed, Dahal said.

"We want to create a climate for investment through a fast-track route," he said. "At present what we have is a culture of bureaucratic hurdles.

He also said the government has been thinking of removing the legal hurdles to investment as soon as possible.

"We want to centralise public-private partnership for mega projects since such partnership at the local level is not enough," he said. "Once big models are established, the people will themselves create small models.

Even after the changes of 1951 the relationship of property was a feudalistic one, according to Prime Minister Dahal. "We have been backward because our culture is to compromise with the past," he said.

There is need to involve labourers and farmers in the development process, Dahal said.

The present Maoist government, in its economic programme, repeatedly says that it will move ahead with public-private partnership.

"PPP is a new concept and all stakeholders should be conceptually clear about it," Joshi said. "We have organised this workshop to make it clear that without conceptual clarity and understanding, we cannot achieve anything from PPP.

He said that a unified national policy for investment and the roles of the private and public sectors are issues that need to be clarified.

According to Secretary at the Ministry of Local Development Ganga Datta Awasthi, a new act of parliament is needed for PPP to move forward since that will finally

clarify the roles of the two sectors although PPP began in Nepal in the 1990s.

In his paper on the PPP experience in Nepal, Cherian Thomas of the Infrastructure Development Finance Company Limited, which has a 22 percent government stake in its Indian Rs. 300 billion worth of assets for investment, said that Nepal needs to learn from India's mistakes.

India has examples of PPP in power distribution, roads, solid waste management, tourism, ports and airports, bus terminals, etc..

"There needs to be enough discussion between various parties in the project design stage," he said.

Right policies and regulatory frame works, sustainable financial incentives, transport selection process and political will are important pre-requisites, according to Thomas.

As Joshi said in his remarks, "The private sector's aim is definitely to earn a profit but we also think that it should be respectful and socially justified. We are committed to it as well.

The two-day symposium has been divided into six sessions, namely tourism, local development, education, agriculture, infrastructure and health, and these high-powered sessions will be chaired by the ministers concerned, with the vice chairman of the National Planning Commission chairing the session on agriculture.