--By Madan Lamsal

 

The worries of inadequate investment in Nepal, both foreign and domestic, are superfluous at their core. Nepal enjoys every bit of beauty of being a small economy, including quick satiation in investment. It has limited number of attractive sectors for investment. Agriculture, bourse and bank, gold, housing and hydropower and tourism. Perhaps that’s all. And, all these sectors seem to have saturated - though not by harnessing their due expansion potentials but by their unique worn-out faces lacking charm.

 

Nepali businessmen and entrepreneurs have developed their own model of taking the sector of their investment choice to a saturation point and, politicians and bureaucrats have immensely helped to the cause. A few examples will shed more light on this unique Nepali model on investment satiation.

 

Nepali agriculture has its proud history of employing the largest size of the national workforce. Nepali farmers have special skills that have helped them to be accustomed in the camel farms in the Caribbean to rain-forests in the Far East. If one looks at passport of majority of migrant workers, its occupation column invariably says 'agriculture'. And, most of them are assigned any job but agricultural work in the destination countries. This unique way of exporting our workers ensures less salary than those who carry passports with specified exact profession. Then the migrated workers have every chance of coming back home to relive the agriculture. This indeed is enough for our agricultural growth.

 

There was a time when the county was abuzz about investment in the hydropower. Now the investors in the sector have increased their portfolio exposure in the housing business as well. Therefore, the line between the hydro and housing has been further blurred and you don't need to wait for ‘load shedding’ not to see it. It is a common knowledge that Nepal housing industry has attracted investment from every possible group -- big businesses, NRN to petty brokers. Every patch of habitable land now appears to have been plotted for houses of different shapes and sizes thereby putting cap on further investment.

 

Coming back to hydropower, every bold investor will turn bald by the time he gets PDA, grinding himself under the Nepal's bureaucratic wheel that runs a non-stop cycle of indecision. Even if one obtains PDA, the Nepali incarnations of Che Guevara don't spare the developers from duly paying levy. There are local Gods in every nook and corners of the country that seek offers to bless the investors to commence the work. Thus, the investment in this sector is as if enough.

 

Gold is gold. It is now Nepal's one of the five largest imports and the amount invested in it is whopping big. In fact, the trade in gold is putting Nepal back in its proud identity of land with possibility of trading everything - from idols, artifacts, drugs to anything you can smuggle.

 

Banks and financial institutions attracted massive investment in the last decade. But now, when a revolutionary finance minister labeled the stock-market a gambling hub, the investment in BFIs too became a true gamble. The share price of a new bank increases at the rate of five percent per annum. That explains the saturation too.

 

Tourism perhaps is the oldest of our modern businesses. But tourist visit Nepal not because there is huge investment in the infrastructures and facilities. They come for nature trek or to experience. And the tourists who come here are not much different from a common Nepali. A backpacker from the west arrives in Nepal when he is left with the last couple of hundred green bucks. Whether there is investment or not, these guys will come here. Therefore the very concept of investing in this sector too doesn't hold much water.

 

Then, why worry? If every possible sector is so pitcher-full, there is no reason to complain about absence of FDI or home investment. If anyone is still interested to invest in Nepal, they should better choose the political parties, not the goods or services industry, to double or quadruple their returns in investment in no time. If tips and rate of return is concern, the investors can take lessons from those who have achieved impressive gains from this seriously new enterprise called Nepali politics. If you can see, the largest inflow of foreign funds is therefore concentrating on political parties.