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All about Foreign Loans

The House is in full swing as our newbie lawmakers slowly learn the rules and the decorum and many other procedures when it comes to the sessions and we wish them all the best. The recent discussion in our parliament was about foreign loans.

Harka Sampang is a good man. I would like to request the Balen government to form a 'Shram' commission and make Harka the chairperson. We should first start with our prisons so that our inmates will be productive and contribute their labor to work on our irrigation systems, roads and other development projects instead of just getting holed up inside and suffering from mental and other problems because most of them have to stay idle and do nothing.

Well, let's talk about foreign loans today. Harka thinks we should not be taking any foreign loans at all or if needed then must be approved by our lawmakers. Even our former Finance Minister, Barsha Man Pun is making fun of the new government by telling the media that this government came to power promising not to take foreign loans and look at them now.

Hope Sudan Gurung, our Home Minister will investigate then Maoist government's request from a Chinese businessman for Rs 50 Karod gift to pay off other lawmakers to pass some bills in the House back then. It seems that our Maoists had more shady Chinese byapari friends rather than anyone from the Communist Party of China.

Barsha Man Pun has also been linked to other Chinese businessmen engaged in gold smuggling and other illegal acts in our country. Hope the new government will also look into this and the main folks who could help the government would be Krishna Bahadur Mahara and his son, who are still under investigation for gold smuggling with the help of their Chinese friends.

Khusbu Oli, from the RPP, also questioned the recent foreign loans approved by the government from the ADB and the World Bank for digital transformation and other projects. I guess nobody told these people that we are dependent on loans, be it domestic or foreign and in the past two decades, we have increased our total debt from less than US$ 5 billion to more than US$20 billion today. So let us thank our Oli, Deuba and Prachanda governments for taking out massive loans while doing nothing productive with it.

Harka is right when he says that foreign loans or any loans must be approved by the Parliament. If that's the case, then the RSP has more than 75% majority in the House so maybe the Balen government should just do that so that Harka will not ask for such approval again.

In the past, our governments took loans from the Chinese to build hydropower projects and airports and we will be spending millions of dollars servicing the debt for decades to come, while these projects make no profit. India refuses to buy the electricity generated from hydropower projects built with Chinese money. When it comes to our two new international airports, the Indians are not willing to give us flight access so far and it's because we took huge loans from the Chinese to fund these projects as well.

Every year, we need to borrow a few billion dollars to balance our books and unless we work on our exports and increase our revenue from tourism, agro products, and even IT services, we will be borrowing from both our domestic and foreign lenders for decades to come. Let's hope our new government will work on this, and hopefully, we can stop taking loans in the years to come while we gradually pay off our loans and be debt free in two decades or less.

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