Planning: Never without aid

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Foreign assistance in Nepal has involved multiple donors, billions of rupees and numerous projects — all funding remarkable portions of all Five Year Plans.

The year 1951 was remarkable for two events that dramatically altered Nepal´s political and economic directions. The first, of course, was the end of the century-old Rana regime, stirring political consciousness that swept hill and Terai. The second was that foreign aid made its debut in January of that year, about a month prior to the Fagun Saat democracy proclamations. The United States Government´s gift of NRs 22,000, provided under President Harry Truman´s Point Four programme, was the first droplet of foreign aid, which was soon followed by grants and technical assistance programmes from India and others. For a country that had been heretofore rigidly isolationist, Nepal decided that it liked the taste of aid, and opened the faucet wider. For whatever good it might have done, foreign aid had since come to stay, in a flurry of donor dollars, marks, yen and pounds. According to an unofficial estimate made by a member of the National Planning Commission (NPC), the total aid (including loans) that Nepal has gathered since 1951 to 1990 from both foreign governments and international banks, stands at a stunning current-price figure of around NRs 85,000 million.

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