KATHMANDU: They weathered a 10-year armed insurrection that saw their college in western Nepal come under a bomb attack by the Maoist rebels. But five years into peace, worse work conditions are compelling India's Manipal Group of Companies to plan pulling out of Nepal.
The company's Nepal venture, the Manipal Education and Medical (Group) Nepal, is planning to shut down its Manipal College of Medical Sciences in tourist city Pokhara in western Nepal and its accompanying 825-bed teaching hospital after junior Nepali doctors went on strike from Sunday. The strikers, affiliated to the All Nepal Progressive Health Workers' Association that is loyal to the ruling Maoist party, say there is pay disparity between Nepali and expatriate doctors, an allegation that is denied by the management.
The doctors' strike comes after a series of illegal strikes by trade unions to force the company into increasing workers' pay and a series of vandalising attacks by patients' relatives and outsiders.
The college authorities are now ready to think of pulling out and have begun consultations back home in India to accommodate the students in their two colleges in Karnataka and Sikkim. They have decided to hold talks with the new prime minister, Dr Baburam Bhattarai, after he returns from his trip to New York to attend the 66th UN General Assembly, and if the talks fail, to begin the process of exiting.
Ironically, the decision comes even as Nepal's new finance minister, Barsha Man Pun, this month announced that Nepal would observe 2012 as investment year, seeking foreign direct investment. However, India, the biggest investor in Nepal, remains wary, especially since ITC's joint venture in Nepal, Surya Nepal, closed its new state of the art garments factory in Biratnagar -- where ITC's John Players and Springwood line of garments were manufactured -- in August due to trade union trouble.
Bhattarai, a Jawaharlal Nehru University scholar, will be visiting India after his return from New York. The trouble plaguing Indian investors in Nepal is sure figure weightily during his talks with the Indian authorities. Besides Manipal and ITC, United Telecom Ltd, Nepal's first private phone services operator, has also been smarting under union unrest and discriminatory policies of the telecom regulator. United Telecom is a joint venture of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, Telecommunications Consultants India Limited, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited and Nepali partner Nepal Ventures Pvt. Ltd.
The Manipal Group set up shop in Nepal after signing an agreement with the government of Nepal in 1991. However, despite nearly a decade of existence, the authorities say it has not been able to progress beyond Pokhara. Its plans to run a second hospital in Janakpur city in southern Nepal, an engineering college and a dental college have been on the backburner due to the deteriorating security situation in Nepal and the government's failure to implement the conditions it had agreed to.
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