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The regional development planning policy implemented in the early 1970s in Nepal was essential to integrate the country’s three geographic or ecoregions, viz. plain, hills and mountains, as well as to bring on a balanced development sustainably across the three regions and between rural and urban areas by utilizing their abundant natural resources—water, forest and biodiversity. In doing so, the implementation strategies adopted by the policy included the identification of polyfunctional settlements at three levels like regional centres, growth centres and growth points for the hill, Tarai, and mountain regions, respectively, and north–south growth corridor roads linking those regional growth centres for production and circulation. Five development regions were identified from east to west across the country, containing polyfunctional settlements in each of the three ecoregions. Accordingly, investments have been made by the government to provide essential facilities in each of the polyfunctional settlements as per their hierarchical levels and to build north–south road corridors. As a result, the private sector also found pouring investment in the growth centres. Later, two additional policies such as the service centres approach and the district decentralization system were formulated to strengthen this strategy. Despite all these efforts, the strategy attained its intended objectives only to some extent due to several difficulties it faced and now, it is virtually dysfunctional. Not only this, more than a dozen of other development policies implemented over the past six and half decades remained to discontinue, not because they were irrelevant but mainly disliked by the successive governments. The sector-based economic planning that often received high priority since the very beginning also has shown little impact on improving economic conditions in the country. For instance, the agriculture sector has not improved to the desired level, nor has the industrial sector enhanced it and only a fraction of those potential resources has been utilized. The country’s rugged mountains are often blamed as the main obstacle to this shortfall achievement. Other weaknesses included the slow pace of development of road networks due to limited investment funds available compared to the desperately needed amount, ad-hoc decisions in providing facilities and infrastructure in the regions vis-a-vis their centres, lack of seriousness and commitment of government, among many others. If these weaknesses were corrected, we could see the impacts of the regional planning strategy on people and places. However, the strategy is still pertinent to address the unique development problems in the country, it is argued. |
