Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Impacts of Economic Growth, Transportation, and Tourism on the Contemporary Environment

2020; Springer Nature (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-030-50168-6_7

1879-7199

Keshav Bhattarai, Dennis Conway,

Aviation Industry Analysis and Trends

First open to the outside world after the 1950s, Nepal has passed through different phases of economic development. It has advanced from a mixed type (1951–1980) to a fully liberal economy since the 1980s. However, the liberal economic policy prescribed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has not only widened income inequality and disparity in resource sharing but has also made the economy very competitive and beyond the accessible limit to millions of low-income people. Trade deficits have increased, and many old industries that were established with the help of donors and lending agencies have been closed because of their inabilities to compete in the international markets. The disparity has been so extreme that the top 20% richest individuals control over 54% of the resources and the poorest 20% of the population has access to only 4% of the resources. Despite Nepal’s geographic location between two Asian economic giants (China and India), Nepal is yet to establish itself as a land-linked country from its current landlocked status and to rip benefits from its geostrategic location. Instead, Nepal has encountered economic blockades twice within the past three decades from its southern neighbor—India. Since the 2015–2016 economic blockade, Nepal’s focus has been shifted towards its northern neighbor, China, a deviation from century long special relationships with India.Nepal experienced severe political upheavals due to the Maoist insurgency between 1996 and 2006. During this period, a large portion of the development budget was funneled to security spending, fully jeopardizing its economy and making millions of working-age people jobless. Historically, many countries either directly or through thousands of I/NGOs have found Nepal a political laboratory; this practice proliferated very quickly after the Maoist insurgency in Nepal either in the form of human rights or in various pretexts. Some I/NGOs found Nepal a favorite place for proselytizing people into Christian faiths in the pretext of social upward mobility of poor, especially the lower-caste Dalits.Despite the claim of poverty reduction from 45% in 1985 to 15% in 2011, the widening gap between the rich and poor has made life harder for low-income people. Almost 8 million working-age people have emigrated to various countries in search of jobs to remit money back to their families; however, many are returning home in boxes. Within Nepal, due to unplanned bulldozer engineering in the name of road and other developments while ignoring the land capability classes, millions of people have become development victims because of resulting landslides, floods, and other natural and mad-made calamities. In a seismically sensitive landscape, unplanned development has induced more inequality than ever before. Political leaders representing frontier areas (less developed areas) have undertaken various construction projects including the construction of roads. Road connectivity is a good step for development, but unplanned land excavation in the name of road construction, irrespective of the land capability, not only has created numerous environmental problems and rendered households homeless. The unplanned development approach has also aggravated rural communities from a self-sustained livelihood tradition with organic agricultural products to a dependent culture of consuming imported food products. Many productive farmlands are plotted for settlements, while others are left fallow that were previously used for organic farming. Ecosystem services are severely degraded. In order to improve the economy, bring the emigrated Nepali working-age people back home to restore the degraded environment; Nepal has a few options. These include but are not limited to (a) consolidation of fragmented farmlands; (b) providing incentives to utilize farmlands that have been left fallow and re-initiate organic farming on them; (c) creating favorable environments for foreign direct investment (FDI) and establishing various industrial estates; (d) producing electricity from available hydro resources; (e) regulating developmental activities based on land capability classes and making them environmentally friendly; (f) commoditizing resources of the mountain and undulated terrain to promote ecotourism; and (g) linking southern and northern neighbors with electric railways making Nepal a land-linked instead of a landlocked country. These steps might help not only reviving the currently distorted social fabric and restoring ecosystem services, but they may also help improve the Nepali economy.