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 Even as annual tourist arrival numbers remain upbeat—crossing the magical million-mark last year—data on the average daily spending by tourists paint a dismal picture. The latest figures compiled by the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) show an 11 percent decline in daily spending to $47—from $53 in 2017.

The government wants to double last year’s numbers to two million by 2020, while increasing the average daily tourist spending (to $62) as well as the average length of stay. Although these three goals are not necessarily contradictory, Nepal has seen a pattern where an increase in tourist numbers and the average length of stay tends to bring down the average daily spending.

For instance, in 2015, immediately after the deadly earthquake, while tourist arrival numbers plummeted over safety concerns, the average daily tourist spending was a high of $68.5. The primary reason behind the high spending was that tourists who came that year mostly stayed in Kathmandu and Pokhara and in hotels with infrastructure deemed safe—where prices are higher than in other establishments. Of course, the figures were partly skewed by the high prices in the aftermath of the blockade and humanitarian and aid officials travelling to Nepal in high numbers.

Is average daily tourist spending a fair indicator of tourism’s increasing contribution to the economy? Is the government’s goal of increasing daily tourist spending to $62 even realistic given the complexities involving international payment gateways?

The math

Average daily spending figures are derived from gross reported tourism earnings divided by the number of tourists—factoring in the average length of stay. In simple terms, the greater the tourist numbers and the average length of their stay, the higher the likelihood of daily spending figures getting depressed. Overall, in Nepal’s case, an increase in numbers usually means an influx of backpackers who travel on budget—given the state of infrastructures and connectivity issues. An increase in the length of stay also means tourists going on longer treks—which also lowers cost if you are travelling in groups or without a guide.

A backpacker can survive on an average of $30 a day. If you are part of a large group and staying for any length of time, tour operators drive down the margins further.

The average spending could go up significantly if the revenues generated by international airlines were in fact remitted to Nepal. Currently, tourism revenues from only Nepali airlines are considered, whereas nearly two-thirds of the tourists coming to Nepal are serviced by international airlines. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that would make a difference of at least $20 on daily spending.

Another issue is complexities involving remitting the earnings through international payment gateways. It is not clear how much of the payment made through international booking sites is accounted for in these calculations.

Additional factors

But experts include another contributing factor for driving down spending figures this year: payments made either in China or through payment systems such as WeChat and Alipay—where the money never enters the country. As the number of Chinese tourists soars, along with Chinese-run tourism businesses in Nepal, transactions often take place through China-based payment systems that have no linkages to local banking networks. (On May 21, The Himalayan Times reported about how Nepal Rastra Bank had banned the use of these Chinese digital wallets in Nepal, yet the same story acknowledges how difficult it will be to enforce the ban.)

Some even point to a Hundi connection to travel related transactions from countries such as South Korea and Japan. According to this theory, as the government tightens the noose on Hundi, Nepali entrepreneurs are increasingly parking in Japan and South Korea a significant portion of the payments made by Nepal-bound tourists. While some of these may be taking place to bypass the stringent foreign exchange regime to make genuine business-related payments, that does not entirely explain the significant dip in the average spending.

Some officials also think that the significant increase in the number of Sri Lankan and Thai visitors to Lumbini—who arrive for a day trip and tend to spend very little, except for visa fees—skew the data.

These anomalies in spending are not a fair indicator of tourism’s contribution to Nepal’s economy; travel-related jobs continue to soar, with an average of one job created by every two tourists. But there is clearly more to these variances between tourist numbers and money, which needs to be investigated and addressed to maximize the benefits of a booming tourism sector.

 Harvard has asked Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. of the Harvard Law School and first African-American dean at the college, to step down from his position. The esteemed professor had announced his intention to defend Harvey Weinstein in January, which led to months of student protests before Harvard finally made the call to ask him to step down. Weinstein is well-known for not just producing exquisite works of cinema, but also for molesting, sexually harassing, groping and raping over 80 women. The numbers probably exceed a 100, as not all women come forward.

Twitter was immediately up in arms about this decision, with hundreds of people supporting the lawyer for doing his just duty to defend an unpleasant character. Well-known journalist Glenn Greenwald immediately put out a Tweet in his defense, calling out the “racism”. The fact that over 80 women had faced sexual, mental and psychological trauma for years, with serious consequences to their careers, financial security and emotional well-being seems trivial, compared to the injury faced by Professor Sullivan Jr. in doing his legal duty.

While the right for all violators to a fair defense is enshrined in the law, I wonder if the African-American students who stepped out in such vociferous outrage against the dean’s ouster would have done the same for a white Harvard law professor who took the same decision to defend a police officer who’d killed over 80 unarmed black teenagers. Would they be as enthusiastic if the law professor in question decided to defend the man who bombed the black churches? What about defending the leaders of the Rwanda genocide—surely they too are entitled to a legal defense? But would a white professor who did that still expect to hold on to his teaching position? I doubt.

The reason why a white professor would choose not to defend such a character is simple—while it is written in the law that everyone is entitled to a defense, simple human decency and awareness of the atrocities faced by African-Americans at the hands of the police would make this decision to stay away from such a character a no-brainer.

Note there is no “ism” for women who draw the same outrage—a mass rapist is entitled to his legal defense, but the 80 women who came forth and the many who didn’t don’t deserve the same defense. “Sexism” doesn’t even begin to touch the level of misogyny in the way this debate is unfolding. I see not a single Tweet in defense of the women who were Weinstein’s victims.

If only this debate was just about an African-American man’s right to do his unpleasant duty. This is not just the 100 odd women whom Weinstein probably raped in his lifetime, but the thousands of women who have faced sexual violence in conflict and war, the millions who have suffered workplace sexual violence and rape, and the ever increasing cases of male impunity which creates conditions ripe for rape of girls, aged a few months to teenagers, at the hands of men of all ages in developing countries.

If Harvard thinks this debate is only about racism, it is wrong. (Sullivan Jr. is still in the faculty.) This is about the lives of millions of women who have been affected and harmed by sexual violence worldwide. Sexual violence offenders permeate every institution at every level worldwide, pushing women out from public life, affecting their emotional and financial security, and making them even more vulnerable to violence.

What goes on at Harvard filters down everywhere and becomes legal norms in every other country, including Third World countries with poor legal regimes like Nepal. As an academic institution which often comes in the top rankings of the entire world, Harvard cannot afford to think this is about the abstract rule of law.

To allow someone to flaunt his male privilege in this manner would be akin to allowing someone who defended Nazis to be on the law faculty. The mass atrocity committed by the notorious Weinstein ticks all the boxes of a crime against humanity. I was myself surprised to learn this, but you don’t need millions of people affected by a crime for it to be a crime against humanity—about 80 will do if the crime is egregious enough. And you cannot have a man who defends crimes against humanity teaching students at Harvard.

For the many girls and women of Nepal who’ve faced violence in school at the hands of teachers, such as the women who were molested as children by Uttam Tripathi at Lalitpur Madhyamik Vidhyalaya, these scars never heal. For the women in Nepal who were raped and killed during the conflict by soldiers, justice will now only come in the form of how we reshape institutions so they are free of predators, including opportunistic ones who will use their social and institutional standing to defend other predators.

Let’s have a true debate about who the victims are in this discourse. It is not law professor Sullivan Jr. If the concern is about African-American faculty and their marginalization at Harvard, the solution is simple: hire the many brilliant black women lawyers who have fought hard and long all through their lives against sexual violence. There are many of them, all equally powerful and all equally capable of becoming deans of the college.

Any man this tone deaf to the worldwide #MeToo movement doesn’t deserve to be teaching at one of the finest colleges in the world. For Harvard to allow this man to remain on the faculty would be a travesty of justice.

 President Bidhya Devi Bhandari’s address to the joint session of the parliament has been criticized and even mocked. In particular, her use of the phrase ‘my government’ has come under scrutiny. By that logic, last Friday, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli went to the parliament as a citizen and came out as a subject, someone tweeted—clearly a reference to the royal era. Jest and hair-splitting over constitutional niceties aside, the content of the speech calls for careful examination.

Policy and programs are a vision document for the entire year or even for multiple years. It not only outlines ambitions but also provides a clear basis for achieving them. The half-heartedness in preparing this document is visible from the get-go. One would assume that a serious government document would make efforts to avoid tenuous claims: ‘transitions of all kinds have ended,’ (point number 4) or ‘mobilization of human resources [to implement the federal set-up] has been completed’ (point number 7).

For all intents and purposes, the federal transition has just begun. Equally misleading is the claim about completing the mobilization of human resources for the federal set-up. Many provinces are still reporting up to 70 percent unfilled vacancies. There also are inherent contradictions in many parts. The document argues that there has been a 27 percent increase in capital formation in the country and subsequently highlights the government’s austerity measures and savings—which it intends to mobilize for building infrastructure. Yet it also commits to increasing social security allowances and pay and perks for civil servants. The benefits given to civil servants should be increased, no doubt—but it should be accompanied by a downsizing of the bureaucracy and the outsourcing of several services to the private sector—which will help balance the book while paying competitive salaries to the public sector workforce.

Transformative changes

The address by the President highlighted several projects as if they were symbols of substantive changes—such as the steamers operating in Nepali rivers, the airlifting of a pregnant woman from Mugu, the response to the tornado in Bara-Parsa, and the completion rates of several airports and national pride projects. But in the same speech, Bhandari also admitted that the goals of ‘bringing transformative changes to the public service and increasing capital expenditure’ were not achieved due to ‘a traditional work culture, legal complications and weak mechanisms of accountability’.

Yet the address failed to offer examples of how the government was addressing these issues. While the President’s speech did touch on the problems—the issues around structure and the culture of civil service and the associated mechanisms of good governance—it only made passing references to addressing it in Year Two of the government. She repeated a cliché by way of a solution: performance-based contracts (PbC). Administrative reform is much wider and more complex. But let’s say for argument’s sake that PbC was a panacea. Who would spearhead its implementation? And will political appointees come under its purview? Even if someone in the PMO completely understood the concept of PbC in its entirety as well as the procedures for operationalizing it (which I doubt), they don’t have the will to carry it out.

Bizarre plans

Two bizarre plans stood out: eradicating the ‘psyche of poverty’ and converting suitable sections of national highways into emergency runways. (Even aviation officials are baffled by this one or how it made it into this serious document; perhaps this is what qualifies as thinking outside the box these days.)

The US Federal Aviation Authority database suggests that on average a dozen small single-engine planes land on highways every year, but for bigger passenger planes the instances are fewer—with disastrous consequences even for developed countries with flat terrains and roads worthy of being called a highway. In 1971, a Pan International Airline flight’s (BAC-111) emergency landing in German Autobahn killed 22 passengers; and in 1977, a DC-9-31’s forced landing in the highways of southern Georgia in the US killed 72 people, including nine on the ground.

Quirks aside, Nepal’s ambitions for a double-digit growth, middle-income status and prosperity are within reach—provided that our officials spend a little more time overhauling the delivery and deliberation mechanism and the work culture in line with the federal principle.

Once again, we have invited the Chinese president Xi Jinping to Nepal and once again we got the same reply: That the visit will take place at a suitable time. And once again, we are all pumped up about the proposed Kathmandu-Keyrung train, as if the project is almost complete. But as things stand, both Xi’s visit and Kathmandu-Keyrung train are wishful thinking or, as the Chinese say, bai ri meng. China is reluctant to help Nepal or have its president visit Nepal because our uber-nationalists and more-Chinese-than-the-Chinese-themselves intellectuals and leaders have been promoting a narrative that is disastrous to our ties with both India and China.

The major flaw in the popular narrative is that it views Sino-Nepal ties as strengthening Nepal’s position vis-à-vis India and unnecessarily drags China into our bilateral relations with India. We are made to believe China is more than happy to help Nepal stand up to India. We should be all excited about the proposed train because it will end our dependency on India and that will drastically weaken India’s stranglehold on Nepal. As such, we have linked the Chinese president’s visit to Nepal and the train with weakening Indian influence, to feed anti-Indian nationalism and to bolster the nationalist credentials of the political leaders—and some intellectuals.

This makes it difficult for China to either move forward with the train project or have its president visit Nepal because it fears Delhi will interpret those as China’s endorsement of anti-Indianism in Nepal—something Beijing wants to avoid at all cost, especially when it is hoping for the Indian support, if not outright membership, of the BRI.  

Thus the Chinese have been dropping hints that they are not comfortable with our approach to viewing China as a solution to all our issues with India. They have been openly—symbolically and verbally—advising our leaders to maintain good relations with India, and making it clear they don’t want to have anything to do with our problems with India. That’s why they didn’t give us any real help during the Indian embargo in 2015-16.

The first major non-verbal signal was having then Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal “accidentally” bump into President Xi back in 2016. Not just that. Indian Prime Minister Modi accidentally walks into the hotel suite where the two leaders are talking, and a photo is allowed to be taken and posted on Dahal’s son’s Facebook page. The Chinese are known to use photos to signal change in attitudes or drop indirect hints about what they think.

For example, when China wanted to improve ties with the US, it invited to Beijing Edger Snow—an American journalist who presented the communists in a good light to American readers through his articles and, most famously, through his book, the Red Star Over China. The occasion was the National Day celebrations in 1970, where a photo of Snow standing next to Chairman Mao was published in the People’s Daily to signal that China was ready to normalize relations with the US.

Just like us, the Americans were also slow to understand the symbolism behind the photograph. Domestically too, the Chinese regularly use photos to tell the people which leader has fallen out of favor with the supreme leader or has risen in the party hierarchy.

There’s a memorable photograph of the late King Birendra’s meeting with Mao in 1973, in which all but premier Zhou are seated in comfortable sofas. Zhou is made to sit in a strangely placed wooden chair to signal to the Chinese people that the chairman has serious issues with the premier. “In February 1972 Chou had a comfortable armchair when US president Nixon came calling. By December 1973, Mao had banished Chou to a humiliating hard chair when meeting the Nepalese king,” (Jung Chang and John Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story).

Then came a clear verbal signal with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi going into the 2+1 (China + India) model on Nepal during our foreign minister Pradeep Gyawali’s visit to Beijing last year.

We need to understand that no real Chinese help will come unless India feels comfortable. In a popular Chinese question-answer website, zhi hu—which serves as a platform for Chinese public intellectuals to discuss and debate issues and answer interesting questions—Mr Long, who wants us to call him “Xiao Xuosheng,” posted a lengthy and possibly the most well-informed reply in China to the question: ‘How to view the Keyrung-Kathmandu train plan?’ As we are not getting the perspective of ordinary Chinese people or public intellectuals on the issue, allow me to translate the conclusion from his well-informed post from July 2018.

“One major problem facing the Keyrung-Kathmandu train is Indian obstruction… Railway line to Kerung is 100 percent certain… Let’s not doubt it. It’s in China and no other country should care what China does in its territory. 

“But in the Kathmandu-Keyrung stretch there exists international political risks. [Only] Nepal’s effective handling [of pressure] and China’s determination will make the extension possible. If Nepal backs down or chickens out [note that he uses the phrase song le, which can mean many things but in online Chinese lingo, it mostly means back down due to fear], then it can’t be constructed. The probability of no extension to Kathmandu is around 40 percent.

Not optimistic, not pessimistic, just an objective analysis.”

And 60 percent likelihood is not a very optimistic scenario, just as Mr Long is cleverly implying. But the more we keep viewing it as a must to upset India’s role in Nepal, the greater the chances that China will back out of the project although it is on the BRI agenda. Antagonizing India over Nepal will not be a smart move for China. Also there’s no guarantee that Nepali politicians will be able to withstand the Indian pressure. We need to accept that much can change in Kathmandu in the days ahead and between India and China in the months ahead. The train is still a decade away. 

In the meantime, if we want the Chinese president to come calling, our politicians and scholars must delink India from Sino-Nepal ties. Let’s ask ourselves: Why does President Xi feel comfortable visiting the countries that China has territorial issues with, namely, India, Vietnam and the Philippines, but is reluctant to come to Nepal, a country that never tires of reiterating its historical ties with China?