EPG member suggests forging trilateral energy cooperation

Kathmandu, Feb. 23: A member of the Eminent Persons’ Group (EPG) and Indian professor Mahendra P. Lama said that Nepal lost the game in energy cooperation with India and China. 

“In both India’s ‘Act East Policy’ and China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative, energy is a core content. Nepal started well, but somewhere it lost the track,” Professor Lama said while delivering a lecture on ‘India and Nepal in the 21^st Century: Aspirations and Challenges’ organised by the Institute of Integrated Development Studies (IIDS). 

The founding vice-chancellor of the Sikkim University said as Nepal lost the track in tapping the energy potential, the standard track became that of “don’t do it yourself and don’t let others do it.”

According to him, both ways Nepal lost the game and undermined its unparalleled comparative edge.

However, he pointed towards a better future as Nepal-India-China energy tri-junction has gradually emerged as a crucial geographical area for cross-border energy exchanges. 

“Besides the politico-historical participation of India and China in the development of Nepal’s hydro power resources, there are several factors that are likely to trigger a vibrant energy exchanges among these countries,” he said. 

He urged the governments of both three countries to put the people-to-people level relations at top slot and the government-to-government level relations at the bottom spot. 

“However, the very nature of state formation, foreign policy orientation and governance structure and power echelons on both sides of the border somehow put the government-to-government relations at the top spot,” he said. 

“I feel this overwhelming domination of governments underplaying and even neglecting the other three core interactive terrains invariably creates some sort of awkward situation that is known as bilateral chicaneries and imbroglios.”

He said that historically Nepal-India relations had been firmly established in four distinct interactive terrains – at the people-to-people level, civil society level, business-commercial level and government-to-government level. 

According to him, India and Nepal should rethink and renegotiate their relationship and let the people-to-people institution lead the relationship along with civil society level and business-commercial level interaction, and let the government to government deliberations, negotiations and operational details are carried out to facilitate and consolidate the role of these three core actors. 

He suggested India, Nepal and other South Asian countries to sign a convention to collectively work on the issues of migration outside the SAARC region to protect each others’ migrant community, coordinate a collective position on immigration policies of the destination countries, collective bargaining with the developed market economies and other labour importing countries on making labour market more liberal, check human smuggling and irregular migrants and even provide skills to potential migrants. 

Published in The Rising Nepal on 24 January 2018.