In this photograph taken on April 28, pedestrians walk past damaged buildings of Durbar Square in Kathmandu, following an earthquake in the Himalayan nation.


Reuters, IANS/Kathmandu

Earthquake-battered Nepal will ask international donors to support a reconstruction plan that is expected to cost $6.6bin over five years, the government said yesterday.
Two quakes on April 25 and May 12 killed 8,787 people and destroyed more than 500,000 homes, affecting 2.8mn of the Himalayan nation’s 28mn
people.
Losses to the economy from Nepal’s worst disaster on record stand at $7bn, including from tourism, the government said in a Post Disaster Needs
Assessment (PDNA) report.
Suman Prasad Sharma, a senior finance ministry official, said 36 countries and 24 donor agencies had been invited to a conference on June 25 to pledge support for reconstruction.
“We have expectations of a very handsome and good support from our donors during the conference,” Sharma said at a function in Kathmandu. Currently, Nepal gets two-thirds of the cost of its economic development in international aid.
Government officials said some donors who cannot pledge more aid could still help Nepal by writing off debt the country owes or delaying repayment schedules. Nepal does not have commercial borrowings from international lending agencies.
Concessional loans mainly from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank account for 18% of Nepal’s gross domestic product, according to the officials. The government spends $300mn in debt repayment every year.
Local donors say post-disaster reconstruction must be more accountable in a country that ranked 126 of 176 nations surveyed in Transparency International’s corruption perception index in 2014, compared with 116 a year earlier.
Nepal’s annual economic growth is expected to slow down to 3.04%, the lowest in eight years, from 4.6% estimated earlier, according to its statistics bureau, due to the impact of the earthquakes on tourism and infrastructure.
One in every four Nepalis lives on a daily income of less than $1.25.
The quakes have also set back Nepal’s efforts to fight poverty by increasing the number of poor by 700,000 to 7.78mn, according to Govind Raj Pokharel, vice chairman of the National Planning Commission.
TRANSPORT AGREEMENT: The Nepal government has decided to sign the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (BBIN) Motor Vehicles Agreement for the regulation of passenger, personal and cargo vehicular traffic amongst four Saarc countries.
Minister for Physical Infrastructure and Transport Management Bimalendra Nidhi will sign the agreement on behalf of the Nepal government in Bhutanese capital Thimphu tomorrow.
“With approval from the cabinet, I am travelling to Thimphu to sign the motor vehicles agreement. The agreement is nothing other than the Saarc Motor Vehicles Agreement,” Nidhi said.
This new agreement is expected to help revive the stalled South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (Saarc) motor vehicles agreement, the meeting for which could not take place after the devastating earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25.
“This new agreement is neither alternative nor parallel to the Saarc motor vehicle agreement. Saarc itself has mandated to the member states to initiate bilateral, trilateral or sub-regional co-operation on various mutually beneficial areas,” said Nidhi, who was travelling along with his secretary, Tulshi Prasad Situala, to Bhutan yesterday.
The agreement will be signed tomorrow preceded by a secretary-level meeting today that will make all necessary preparations for the agreement.
“We are still negotiating for Saarc motor vehicles agreement as early as possible but due to the April 25 earthquake, we could not convene the meeting,” said Nidhi.
The proposed Saarc motor vehicles agreement was approved during the Saarc Summit in Kathmandu in November 2014.
But it could not be signed due to reservations of Pakistan. The Saarc Declaration in the Kathmandu summit also encouraged member states to initiate regional and sub-regional measures to enhance connectivity. Accordingly, it was considered appropriate that a sub-regional motor vehicle agreement among Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (BBIN) may be pursued.
A meeting of secretaries of transport of the BBIN countries was organised by Nepal’s ministry of road transport and highways in February 2015 to discuss and finalise the text of the draft BBIN Motor Vehicles Agreement.
The signing of BBIN agreement would promote safe, economical, efficient and environmentally sound road transport in the region and would further help each country in creating an institutional mechanism for regional integration.
BBIN countries would be benefited by mutual cross-border movement of passenger and goods for overall economic development of the region. Each member state of the BBIN sub-regional grouping would bear its own costs arising from implementation of this agreement which will go a long way in cementing regional cooperation and enhancing trade among member states.