TAKING STOCK: The do nothing culture You must be noticing, as I do when I am on the roads of Kathmandu, people doing nothing. I talk not of those loitering around or wasting their time on the streets, though there are enough of them, I talk of shopkeepers. Most, at most times, are merely waiting for customers to come. They are either staring into space, or looking with glazed eyes at the traffic passing by, or are thumbing through the same magazine yet one more time. These people will not come in any list of the unemployed. But in comparison to what they are capable of doing they are virtually unemployed. ‘Severe underemployment’ is perhaps the right term to characterise their state. There is much less of such wastage in the US. Time is money and you just cannot while away your time doing nothing. You would be sacrificing too many dollars if you did that. People who work in stores have a constant pressure of customers whom they have to service. Most retail activity has passed into the hands of mega-stores like the Wal-Mart. Customers have to wait in lines at the check-out counters as the cashiers work without a break charging and processing payments. This increases efficiency in the entire economy. Manpower is productively used. Another area of an even starker contrast is agriculture. While 60-70 per cent of the Nepali population is engaged in feeding itself and the rest of the country, in the US just two to three per cent of its people feed not only the whole of America, but grow enough to send grains and other produce to many parts of the world. The underemployment and low productivity in the agricultural sector in Nepal is even more severe than in its retail sector. What options does Nepal have? It must stop protecting and subsidizing retail and agriculture. It must open its market, permit free trade, allow foreign investment in all areas including agriculture and retail. If a large number of people are displaced from the farms and shops, what will they do? If you just look around, you will see that there is plenty to do. Nepal needs better and more roads, hospitals, electricity, water, airports, housing, industry, computers and software. You name it and Nepal could do with more of it. These are the areas where people, freed from drudgery of spending time waiting for customers or 10 people working in place of one in the farms, should be working. What is stopping this process from taking place? In a free market economy, this process is seamless and will be taking place day in and day out. After all America too went from almost all of its people being employed in agriculture, to working in a modern economy where farm work now means operating the machinery which does the job. In Nepal, the transformation from a rural agrarian economy to a modern one can be much faster. The world already has the capital and technology; America had to create both to move its people from agriculture to industry, and then to the services arena. All Nepal has to do is to let it happen and happen it will in record time. Let capital and technology come to Nepal for investment in any sector. Let managerial talent face no visa and immigration hurdles. Abolish government restrictions and prohibitions which keep capital, technology and people out. Nepal will take a giant leap into prosperity, and the days of its people surviving on less than a dollar a day will be consigned to the dustbin of history. And yes, shopkeepers will earn far more working for a store like Wal-Mart, than in running a corner shop which they call a ‘business’. And those on the farms will be better-off, no matter what they do away from the land where they were born. The do nothing culture will change if it is allowed to. (The writer can be contacted at: everest@mos.com.np)