Gaun-Besi Ropeways:

Gaun-Besi Ropeways:

An Alternative Future?

MISSING MIDWIFE

In Nepal, the first modern ropeway was built in 1924 but not until over a quarter of a century later was the construction of the first serious goods-transporting road, the Tribhuban Highway, launched. Nepal’s traditional ropeway-the ubiquitous ghirling­boasts an even longer existence extending back into the mists of Nepali history. In spite of its head start, ropeway technology has languished, while roads and highways have become a semiotic synonym for development. And this reversal happened despite the obvious benefits of ropeways in hilly terrain; despite the comparatively high cost of roads, both in terms of finance and the environment; and despite the boost that ropeways would have given to the exploitation of Nepal’s hydropower potential. Instead of pursuing this soft and clean energy option, Nepal’s development planners and decision-makers of the last half century led the country along a non-renewable path dependent on imported petroleum that drains the country’s foreign exchange coffers.

The shortcomings of road-based transport should have impelled the pundits of development, both local and foreign, to examine the history, problems and prospects of ropeways in Nepal from the perspectives of a range of disciplines. Unfortunately, the logic of development aid-on which Nepal became dependent not only for the money but even for the initiation of projects-runs on conservative bureaucratic lines and this necessary introspection never happened. Moving boldly away from explored into uncharted territory is not part of the ethos of foreign aid (Gyawali, 2004). It is widely recognised that Nepal’s development efforts are hampered by the lack of transport facilities, and that the conventional approach of building roads in the hills is too expensive to be sustainable. Within the aid establishment, however, this recognition has not been matched by the drive to search for alternatives. In fact, the ropeways installed in Nepal in recent years were either financed and implemented by the private sector (chapters 6 and 11) or, if by the aid industry, as unintended consequences or unconventional ventures (chapters 8, 9 and 10).

While the foregoing chapters have presented a rich repertoire of case studies, this last chapter offers theoretical reflections on the implications of these experiences. What lessons do past efforts, both successes and failures, suggest? In contemplating the diffusion and stabilisation of ropeway technology in Nepal on a wide scale, where should we start? By asking such questions, this book is, in a broader sense, about advocacy-the influencing of policies, attitudes and behaviour in order to change the way things are and replace them with something better in the future. Alternative technologies are, by definition, innovative technologies that meet new societal challenges, as opposed to entrenched ones ruling the roost. They need effective social carriers, or at least a climate conducive to the activism which enables new developments to emerge.

The collective authorship that produced this volume hopes to stimulate potential social carriers of ropeway technology in Nepal to look afresh at this alternative mode of transport, which includes both traditional Nepali ghirling and modern versions. These groups include investors and policy makers, teachers and activists, researchers and public opinion-makers, all of whom can give meaning to ropeways and ghirling and ensure that a broader consensus emerges about the need to integrate them with the broad Nepali aspiration to a life free of drudgery. As the case studies demonstrate, an alternative technology such as the ropeway is likely to be stillborn if no set of nurturing midwives steps forward.

In a previous study (Gyawali and Dixit, 1996), we had unequivocally argued that ‘the ropeway as an industry has a future in Nepal provided a number of steps are taken to address existing institutional (societal) constraints’. The subsequent ‘action research’ in Barpak as well as the work of the various experts included in this volume not only reinforce our conclusion but help us to tease out the further ramifications that this path of transport development entails. As a result of the additional eight years of snail-paced research and reflection invested in answering questions about ropeway technology, the study itself turned into a discourse about the fundamental issues which underlie the development of transport, and specifically of electro-based ropeways, in Nepal.

This chapter draws out the lessons suggested by the case studies, discusses the problems of sustainability, compares ropeways with roads, analyses who the social carriers of this technology might be, and explores the policy terrain on which the social carriers’ battle for alternatives has to be fought. We look back, ask questions, and, in the later sections, reflect on possible answers.

DRAWING LESSONS

Transport in Nepal’s hills has evolved from the traditional rope ghirling of medieval times to the steel cable suspension bridges, modern ropeways and green, brown and black roads of the present. The most striking feature of this development is the yawning chasm between what villagers need or aspire to and what central authorities think is useful. In this book, those who reflected on the history of ropeway transport in Nepal (Chapter 5) as well as those who reviewed national plans and party policies (Chapter 2) lament that HMG/N does not have a ropeway policy. This was true in 1964, when the NR was built and sadly continued to be the case in 1997, when construction of Manakamana Cable Car began (Chapter 11). The government and its central political leadership may be confused about how to deal with ropeways, but villagers seem to relish them, whether they are the rudimentary ghirling of the informal sector or the more sophisticated Bhattedanda Milkway and the goods-carrying Barpak Ropeway. What accounts for the huge gap between the people’s aspirations and the mindsets of planners? The lack of vision among Nepal’s planners stands in stark contrast to events in another mountainous country, Switzerland.

This land-locked alpine nation has developed a multi-modal transport system where trunk highways serve as the main arteries feeding a rich network of ropeways (Chapter 1) that branch off into the mountainous hinterlands. In the Alps, these transport technologies have reinforced each other, whereas in the Nepal Himalaya roads have smothered ropeways. What powers are behind the political economy of roads and what vested interests underlie that economy? An old study (Wuest and Herzog, 1983) concludes that the NR was unable to function because it was sabotaged by the truck owners of Nepal, who profited from operating on the Tribhuban Highway to supply the capital city with daily necessities. The two authors further suggest that if a reshaped ropeway is to function, operators must co-opt the truck owners into becoming stakeholders so that they, too, have a vested interest in seeing it run properly.

In the case of the NR, however, truck owners couldn’t be budged. Despite the fact that the ropeway came under the jurisdiction of the government-owned NTC and despite the inclusion of supposed users in the governing board (viz. the fertiliser-transporting parastatal Agriculture Inputs Corporation, the NTC, and the Salt Trading Corporation), companies continued to prefer to move their goods by truck. They favoured trucks even though transporting goods by ropeway was cheaper (between Rs 312 to Rs 343 per tonne) than using trucks (Rs 518 per tonne).1  The loading and unloading charge for ropeway usage was only one rupee per bag so this cost, though given as an excuse, was obviously not a deciding factor. While an external ‘conspiracy’ theory may in part explain the dismal state of affairs of the NR, its internal weaknesses cannot be overlooked either.

As the above numbers suggest, marketing should not have been a problem for the government-owned ropeway; however campaigning was not pursued vigorously. Instead, in discussions with the staff, one heard the constant ‘captive market’ refrain, viz. that ‘HMG/N should order its various departments to use only ropeways’. The total operating cost of the NR (not including its cost of depreciation) was about Rs

6.2 million per annum; its income, Rs 3.4 million, was only about half of that. Two obvious reasons for the books being in the red were overstaffing (salaries accounted for about 130 per cent of the income) and poor capacity utilisation (the NR operated an average of 37 hours per month instead of at least ten times more). Political interference and frequent changes in management have been cited as other contributing factors.

In sharp contrast with this apathy, the dynamic response of the same official apparatus during a crisis was nothing short of miraculous. In the aftermath of the 19 July, 1993 floods in Central Nepal, which washed out sections of both the Tribhuban and the Prithvi highways, Kathmandu was cut off and isolated. The Hetauda-Kathmandu Ropeway also lost two towers along the bank of Rapti River and was non-functional, even though a few months before the disaster, the government of France had helped replace the traction rope up to Bhainse. With the help of the army, however, the system was restored in 24 days and ran its full contingent of 212 carriers from 6 AM to 6 PM for 15 days transporting vegetables and other goods to the beleaguered capital city. The system then operated from 10 AM to 5 PM till the Prithvi Highway reopened. After that, the official promises to provide more support to ropeways evaporated and the system lapsed back to being its old inefficient self.

This ‘enthusiasm-depression’ cycle seems to have been a repeat of the events of the 1989 economic blockade of Nepal (also called the ‘trade and transit impasse’ by diplomatic puritans). In July 2004, heavy monsoon rains again damaged both the national highways out of Kathmandu. However, the added tragedy this time around was that there was no NR to revive: it had suffered official euthanasia-ironically at the hands of the very same political forces whose election manifestos promised promotion of ropeways (Chapter 2). Indeed, even the talk of alternative transportation has ceased in the official circles; instead, the discourse has moved toward finding three billion rupees to build yet another highway for Kathmandu.2

In sharp contrast with the official indifference, villagers express zeal for ropeways. Villagers on the ‘wrong side’ of highways-on the other side of a turbulent river-have devised their own ghirling or khit-khite (Chapter 12) and often conduct their daily business using them even at the risk of amputating their fingers. The development apparatus led by the Nepali state with the support of the international aid bureaucracy has been unable to bridge the gap between central apathy and rural enthusiasm for ropeways. This observation begs the serious question: why?

In analysing the problems of the NR, the inescapable conclusion is that institutional will within the Nepali state is lacking during normal times, unlike during a crisis. One expression of the official devaluation of the ropeway is its position within the governmental framework (Figure 5.3, Chapter 5). The MoWT is primarily concerned with building and maintaining roads in Nepal: its DoR is one of the largest technical departments in the country and officials who handle roads are right at the very top of the ministerial hierarchy. The size of the budget and internal allocations within the Ministry (Chapter 2), also suggest that the government’s overwhelming concern is with roads. In the decision-making structure of the Ministry, ropeways are located at the bottom, with far too many levels to climb for any of their problems to find salience at the higher echelons.

All three of the non-Nepalis (Barnaby Smith, Toni Hagen and Dale Nafziger) who contributed to this volume argue for taking risks in development, for taking one step backwards to re-conceptualise Nepal’s transport policy in order to secure more effective rural access rather than to opt, in a knee-jerk fashion, for conventional roads. This is undoubtedly good advice but, unfortunately, the aid bureaucracies of donor countries have resisted such arguments. To Nepal’s detriment, except for the relatively egalitarian United Mission to Nepal, the most conservative donor agencies are based in the countries with the longest histories of development aid and engagement in Nepal.

Even some of the more innovative studies on transportation conducted by the various bodies of the UN (Chapter 3) have resulted in no follow-up; evidently, despite the obvious benefits of ropeways those higher up are not ready to take the plunge. It is not only the Nepali bureaucracy that is risk averse; conservatism transcends the international divide. And as long as development is led by the bureaucracy rather than by the real market at the national economic grassroot level (not the level of international hyper markets like Enron that the international aid bureaucracy tends to favour), risk taking will be anathema in the aid business, whether it is run nationally or internationally. Maybe the real difference between the Swiss example and the situation in Nepal is, ironically, the handicap of the conventional aid paradigm.

What does a shift from the bureaucracy-led development model to one that is genuine and competitive market-led entail? Does it mean that the bureaucracy has no role? Quite the opposite. A policy regime that is one-legged is inherently unstable, even if it leaps from a bureaucratic one to a market-dominated frame (Gyawali, 2003). A three-legged framework is more stable and it allows space for all three players-the state, the market and social auditors-to engage in contestation. The development of ropeways in Nepal by the local market will require balancing the exuberance of developers with the cautionary voices of egalitarian activists, and ideally the state should provide that adjudicatory equipoise.

Again, the Swiss example (Chapter 1) is instructive in this regard. High-capacity and high-profile tourist ropeways must follow strict safety regulations and be licensed by the Swiss federal government, while the rules governing smaller ropeways are lax and cantons and municipalities can license them. However, even the smallest ropeways have to be entered in a topographic cadastral map by the SFFSO to prevent their becoming unforeseen hazards for aircrafts and helicopters. Furthermore, not only the private sector but also the Swiss Army builds ropeways. Indeed, Toni Hagen mentions that the Swiss Army could have erected in 19 hours the ropeway that took four months to construct in Barpak. When a mountainous state with villages and highways threatened perennially by avalanches and landslides develops the capacity for such a high-speed response, it provides a great sense of security to its citizens. A facilitative bureaucracy in Nepal would think along these lines rather than simply about expanding its tender bidding and contracting empire in the roads sector.

Both the Barpak and Bhattedanda ropeways illustrate the question of safety. They were built to boost the local economy by carrying goods rather than people, and were thus designed with low safety standards. But people started riding in them anyway despite the admonitions of the operators. The villagers can hardly be blamed for thinking that a modern contraption from the Swiss Army could be any less safe than their traditional khit-khites (Chapter 12). And it is also true that the Khimti goods carrying ropeway was designed (technically and operationally) to also carry construction crew.

The question in Nepal has thus become whose risk perception is to carry the day. �ogically and conventionally, design engineers and operators should decide. Once operations start, however, local perceptions easily take over, especially if engineers and their agencies have no nearby presence. Was it better to let the pregnant woman die in childbirth in her village because the Bhattedanda Milkway was not meant to carry passengers or to take the risk and send her on the milk carriage to the roadhead from there to a city hospital? Because there was a happy ending to that story (the baby was delivered safely and both mother and child were in good health), those taking the risk, and those permitting it, can feel vindicated.

However, what if there had been an accident as there was in Barpak? Even though Bir Bahadur argues (Chapter 9) that the load of the people at the time of the accident was less than what the carriage normally carried, the blame game can be initiated by many sides for a variety of social purposes. A reticent Swiss aid bureaucracy can feel vindicated that it refused to help; a risk-averse INGO can reinforce its belief that MHPs and not ropeways is what promoting alternatives in Nepal should continue to comprise; and the all-powerful road bureaucracy can continue to dismiss ropeways as it has for the last fifty years, with the additional arguments of safety (conveniently ignoring the fact that deaths on highways are far numerous, making road technology relatively more dangerous).

The question of whether local or external perceptions should be accorded precedence is highlighted in the different ways a local entrepreneur and an outside researcher approach the problem of rural access. The Nepali entrepreneur who implemented Manakamana Cable Car (Chapter 11) talks of making dreams a reality, of making important holy spots more accessible to those who would otherwise be unable to pay homage to the goddess, of being as sensitive to local concerns as practicable. A Norwegian researcher who studied Manakamana (Bleie, 2003) is, on the other hand, more cautionary. Bleie also rightly highlights the undercurrents of tension among various segments of the local population. Some of them relate to decisions where to locate the passenger station of the ropeway, which are similar to the ‘roadhead politics’ familiar to those who implement highway development programmes.3 The researcher argues that building the ropeway has promoted mass tourism and eroded the fundamental idea of individual spirituality implied by religious pilgrimage. This view contrasts very sharply with the view of the entrepreneur, who feels that the cableway has actually increased spiritual wellbeing because people, especially the old and the infirm, who would never have been able to do so otherwise, are making the journey and feeling morally uplifted for having done so.

Of course, one could make the point that instead of driving and taking the cableway, walking to Manakamana on one’s knees, preferably all the way from Kathmandu, is, as it is involves greater hardship, spiritually more meritorious than riding on a cable car. In mountaineering, too, ‘making do with less’, especially bottled oxygen, is more valued by solo mountaineers than by safety-conscious expeditions ladened with expensive gear. But just as an individualistic perception of risk does not apply to mountain climbing organised by trekking companies or permitted by most government agencies, the ascetic form of spirituality mapped by the outside researcher onto Manakamana does not apply to normal householders.

Pilgrimage entails a range of penitentiary stances depending on one’s capacity to challenge and overcome one’s physical and emotional limitations. In Hinduism, as in many other religions, pilgrimage begins with simple obeisance and extends to performing intricate painstaking rituals over days, even years. Were it not so, a Nepali entrepreneur could argue that no true Christian would go to church in an automobile; he should instead walk, lumbered with a heavy cross on his shoulders, after having given away all his possessions to the poor, as Christ commanded his disciples do. The point is that Manakamana Cable Car and the Prithvi Highway do not prevent an ascetic-minded pilgrim from physically chastising himself by walking all the way, using neither ropeway nor bus. But the convenience these infrastructures provide does allow the infirm to worship.

A government cannot prevent users from seeking ease and comfort, but it can stop misuse and iniquity while facilitating new innovations. One example comes from the Barpak experience. How safe is safe and who should decide? Given the bad history of failed development, villagers were not willing to trust the government to implement an MHP or a ropeway scheme (Chapter 9); but they were, at the same time, willing to accept its authority. The Barpak village entrepreneur pretended that his technicians represented HMG/N’s Water and Energy Commission (WEC) in order to get his survey underway. In the Nepali context, this issue boils down to the question of dispassionate regulation versus micro-managed implementation by state agencies; the former is desired and the latter resented. How does one assure that a regulator does not turn into a rent-seeking, inefficient monopoly? More significantly, if a government is to provide some degree of regulation and guidance, what measures can be taken to assure that new initiatives and pilot project ventures do not fail disastrously?

SINS OF UNSUSTAINABILITY

Christensen and Koukios (1997) help us examine these questions in the context of the sustainability of renewable energy enterprises and their pithy conclusions have relevance for those who strive to promote ropeway technology in Nepal. They argue that even though oil is the cheapest and most convenient source of energy for many purposes, many soft energy projects that could compete with oil at current prices have failed to take root, that is, to become self-sustaining and self-generating.

Drawing from the lessons of several demonstration projects been implemented in rural areas of various Greek islands, they conclude that many well-meaning ventures have systemic problems that have nothing to do with the prices of competing forms of energy. They highlight ‘seven deadly sins’ related to the implementation of local soft energy systems; three relate to pre-existing conditions, two are characteristic of the projects themselves, and two follow physical implementation.

In this section, we will examine these seven sins-and their corresponding seven virtues-and see how Nepal’s different pilot projects for ropeways fare in these terms. Villages located on remote hilltops are like mid-ocean islands whose political economies are a function of how far they are from the mainland. In Himalayan hamlets, it is the extent and degree of verticality which determines what can and cannot be done with respect to development.

First sin: irresponsible money

On the Greek islands of Halki and Naxos, large institutions such as the EU, UNDP, FAO and OECD, as well as the Greek government, initiated ambitious wind, solar and biogas projects. Even though these projects were begun with the noble motives of using renewable energy and promoting sustainable development, they were either eventually abandoned or functioned only as long as external funding was available. The problem was not one of insufficient money but rather of its inverse: too much money flowing too freely from remote sources through planners and initiators with no long-term commitment to on-going operations. Christensen and Koukios conclude that this sin should be replaced by a counter virtue: flows of money for demonstration projects should be structured to diminish the power of elite groups who are not responsible for operation and to augment the influence of those who will be responsible for continuing operations.

Pilot projects, whether those in Bhattedanda, Barpak or Manakamana, are often carried forward on the shoulders of unconventional enthusiasts with a mission. They conceptualise a design, rummage around for funding sources, and implement their project with heroic zeal. Those that receive these artefacts as koselee bikas (or ‘development gifts’) are brought in only after the project has been commissioned and only to carry out operation and maintenance. Beyond some labour contributions, they are uninvolved with the bulk of the funding; in fact, even the money required for effective operation and maintenance, which has to be raised from tariffs, is often not agreed upon before deciding to implement a project.

The result of the donor’s initial largesse is that the recipients assume money will continue to flow in later stages, too. By the time the truth dawns on them, it is often too late to prevent the project from running aground. Only Manakamana Cable Car managed to avoid the fate of poor maintenance and that was because it was a fully commercial venture whose investor was solely responsible for the viability of the project and the repayment of the bank loans. A similar case could be made for the construction ropeways of Jhimruk and Khimti (Chapter 6), which served the purpose for which they were designed and implemented. In the future, some framework for matching loans taken by village communities to benefit from ropeways, as is done with micro-hydro stations, might be a responsible way of avoiding the irresponsibility inherent in the koselee bikas model.

Second sin: dysfunctional institutions and policy

Wind turbine projects were initiated in Aperathau and Mykonos, but one operated for only a short time only and the other never got off the ground. They had been implemented within an institutional context moulded by entrenched non-renewable technologies such as diesel generation, which monopolised the supply of electricity on these islands. All problems regarding equipment and construction were defined by institutional policies and practices devised in terms of what such non-renewable energy technologies demanded, and little thought was given to the dissimilar requirements for the operation and maintenance of wind turbines. The renewable energy projects were also pushed forward by local political ambitions, which boiled down to securing as much money as possible from public sources. Neither politicians nor power system managers had any idea of what was needed to install or operate the renewable project. This sin can be rectified if substantial, systematic attention is devoted to identifying and modifying dysfunctional, anachronistic policies, institutional arrangements, and professional practices associated with older technologies.

The Hetauda-Kathmandu Ropeway functioned within an institutional environment dominated by road construction. Its management was, in a sense, confined to the outskirts of decision-making. Governmental policy-makers at high levels came from the road sector and naturally focussed their attention on the DoR. For its growth and sustenance, the ropeway needed its own set of policies and planning principles; it could not, unfortunately, blossom in an institutional environment dominated by roads and vehicles. It is too late by several decades, but it is still worth speculating: what the status of ropeways in Nepal would have been if, for example, something similar to the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre had been set up after the energy crises of the 1970s if and Nepal’s ropeways and their promotion had been brought under its jurisdiction? Displacement of petroleum by indigenous hydropower would have been its major policy priority and the performance of the NR would have been judged by how many litres of imported fuel per freight tonne it displaced every year. If it had had such policy backing, the NR would probably still be running today.

Third sin: engineering and economic ideologies

Both engineering and economics have entrenched ideologies-‘economies of scale’ for the former and ‘price incentives’ through favoured taxes and subsidies for the latter-which foster designs that lean towards gigantism. When coupled with another belief in ‘technological utopianism’ or the unquestioned faith that equipment will function as designed, they produce rusting white elephants unable to survive in their social and environmental contexts. Another related dogma is that, at the project level, engineering-economic analysis points out what is rational use of energy and what is not. In reality, however, the key issues in making energy choices centre are a matter of perception with regard to national vulnerability to global changes, balanced regional development, balance of external trade and environmental health. Rectifying this sin requires identifying and dealing with ideological blinders and associated professional practices that continue to foster dysfunctional approaches to the implementation of soft energy systems.

This sin applies to most of the attempts between 1972 and 1992 to examine the possibility of constructing new ropeways in Nepal (Chapter 3). Much of the official thinking among aid donors and Nepali planners could not transcend the macro framework of regional transport. This myopia was born of their ideological commitment to the macro picture, which prevented them from seeing the tremendous potential for gaun-besi (valley-bottom to ridge-top village) ropeways. Despite the need for and possibility of installing such small-scale ropeways in Nepal’s Middle Hill villages, they concentrated their attention and resources on trans-district systems like the proposed Surkhet to Jumla or Chatara to Bhojpur ropeways despite the obvious problems with the existing Hetauda-Kathmandu scheme. Even on the smaller scale, this proclivity can be seen-with hindsight-in the Barpak case (chapters 9 and 10), in which planning dominated by engineering and economics missed many of the villagers’ motives for operating a ropeway. Ironically, like Jonathan Swift’s big fleas being bitten by smaller fleas on their back, even the powerful economic ideology of privatisation in vogue in the 1990s failed to see the potential benefits of privatising NR instead of letting it rust away. With its ideological power, the entrenched technology of roads overwhelmed the new competitor.

Fourth sin: technical disintegration

In Halki, near Rhodes, renewable energy projects were initiated with a view to promoting a showcase for tourism that included the rehabilitation of buildings, sewerage and water supply, and transport. Each project was treated separately and designed using technologies that were fashionable in sophisticated urban settings, with no thought for the constraints imposed by locally available (or unavailable) resources. Even though money was plentiful, the projects quickly ran into natural resource constraints: water was scarce and high-flow shower heads, large-volume flush toilets and oversized sinks soon ceased functioning. This sin could have been avoided if the designs for the technical systems had been made locally suitable after conducting an integrated technical analysis of resources, technologies, environmental relations, and economics.

Chapter 8 describes how the eventually successful Bhattendanda Milkway had to fight internal battles within the watershed management department against the dominant view that dairy issues had nothing to do with soil conservation or rural transportation. However, more than to Nepali ropeways per se, this sin applies to the many failed ‘integrated rural development programmes’ (IRDPs) of the 1970s and 1980s that promoted micro-hydro and soft-energy systems without integrating them with alternative, soft transport systems such as gaun-besi ropeways. This failure happened in districts where, as the case studies in this book describe, gaun-besi ropeways were later successfully implemented.4 IRDPs promoted horticulture and livestock programmes for rural development without a thought of how to get those products to the market. The result was that apricots and tangerines were left to rot or fed to cattle. Integrated with gaun-besi ropeways, both agricultural programmes and under-capacity MHPs would have performed much better.

Fifth sin: social disintegration

When plans and designs for hardware are developed without explicit and early considerations of the society that is expected to operate and maintain the system and to live with it, projects will be abandoned or forced to shut down. Operators are often an afterthought, brought in only at the handover stage after all the crucial decisions from design to implementation are already a fait acompli. To avoid falling victim to this sin, the design and development of systems must be integrated with the design and development of effective social capacities-institutions-for the operation and maintenance of the systems.

With the exceptions of construction, industrial and private tourism ropeways (chapters 6, 7 and 11), centrally planned ropeways suffered from this sin. Training user groups to operate and maintain ropeways was not seriously pursued early on; it was taken up with some urgency only as the commissioning of the projects drew near. In the case of the Hetauda Cement Factory Ropeway and privately-owned Manakamana Cable Car, training was part of their in-built respective operations. The sin of social disintegration was not perpetrated by these projects. In the case of both the Bhattedanda and Barpak ropeways, however, the learning curve was quite harsh for the communities concerned.

Sixth sin: project learning disability

Evaluations of pilot projects by their advocates and managers often obscure, hide or ignore errors. The dynamics behind the evasion are the imperative to proclaim Project #1 a success so that Project #2 can be funded. But the failure to recognise and publicise mistakes only ensures that errors will be needlessly repeated. A virtue to strive for, therefore, is to evaluate the results of demonstration projects not just in terms of the hardware constructed but also in terms of whether an effective organisation is developed. Without a local body that is both able and motivated to engage in critical self-evaluation and learning, renewable energy projects are doomed to remain pilot schemes that fail as commercial schemes.

While this is a generic sin committed by most pilot projects around the world and Nepal is no exception, ropeways, with the publication of this book, can hopefully be spared this accusation. The various case studies have ensured that the difficulties encountered, the mistakes made and the lessons gleaned are now part of public discourse. Hopefully, the lessons will form part of the sector’s common learning curve.

Seventh sin: policy learning disability

The last sin is committed by those who fund projects and is the same as that of project managers: the refusal to be open about errors and devise corrective measures in order to avoid repeating them. Technical modernisation at the local level involves introducing new and renewable energy technologies. It demands that policy makers at the high end develop the ability to listen to critical evaluations of demonstration projects. Ideally, this assessment should be rooted in internal self-evaluations, but if that proves too incestuous, external reviews should be encouraged. To promote learning, both types of review should be published, widely distributed and discussed at the system level.

In advocating and promoting ropeways as a sensible alternative for transportation in the hills of Nepal, it is hoped that the critical self-evaluation that this book provides will stimulate Nepal’s development community, which includes government departments, aid agencies and academics, to take a fresh look at this technology. An early entrant in this venture was USAID, which enjoyed some success in constructing ropeways in the early sixties before it backed out of infrastructure building to take up the software aspects of development. Without constant engagement in such a specialised venture as ropeways in its various phases, its difficult lessons are not learnt and concomitantly the capacity to use them is not built. While planning its various rural development activities in the 1980s, USAID did not consider ropeways in part because the technology’s broad supporting context of specialists and institutional memory had disappeared. Today we see that gaun-besi ropeways could have complemented the highways and feeder roads of any integrated rural development package in the region from Rapti to Mustang but they did not.

A similar learning disability seems to have been shown by the French, who tried to help rehabilitate Nepal Ropeway (Chapter 5) and by the EU as well, to whose credit goes the Bhattedanda Milkway. While is not known whether the EU conducted the kind of critical self-evaluation that Christensen and Koukios call for, Chris Patten did voice strong support for extending the project deeper into the hinterlands (Chapter 8). Unfortunately, this much desired support does not seem to indicate that an introspective evaluation, which went beyond the regular techno-economic concerns into institutional issues, was carried out. As the drama of the collapse and subsequent revival of the Bhattedanda Milkway described in the case study indicates, the sustainability of such an innovative venture depends on the capacity of local people to take initiatives to tackle issues beyond the functioning of the equipment as per its design. Inculcating the seventh virtue requires a rethinking of local development institutions, their composition and their roles.

ROADS, ROPEWAYS AND SYMBIOSIS

The debate about sustainable transportation has to begin by reflecting on the fact that both roads and ropeways are what is nebulously called ‘infrastructure’. By its very nature, infrastructure is something that is felt by the society at large to be a much-needed item but cannot be justified, at least in the initial stages, as commercially feasible. This is because there is an ‘economic externality’ involved in infrastructural artefacts: the costs incurred and the benefits accrued cannot be reflected in the market prices of different economic actors. There are other more technical names to describe this anomaly: ‘social overhead capital’, ‘the underlying capital of society’, or even the Marxian concept of ‘base versus superstructure’. These are all terms which capture the idea that transportation infrastructure and its economics lie under everything we do.

Infrastructure provides a wide range of benefits that often cannot be fully assessed in order to extract a fair tariff from those provided with its services.5 Due to this externality, there is a need to tax activities that result in losses (environmental, social, national security, etc.) and to provide subsidies to activities that promote the welfare of and help maintain harmony in society. This factor drags infrastructure into the politics of competing choices among different values in a complex society. To understand the larger political economy of rural transportation, which includes ropeways, it is important to address not just costs and benefits that can be measured but also those benefits, such as environmental and rural wellbeing, that cannot easily be quantified but which really count for the people. The following quote captures the dilemma of applying the logic of pure economic efficiency to a Third World rural situation:

All other things being equal, peasants respond to prices. The problem is, all things are rarely equal in the Third World. .It is now clear that farmers will not respond to price increases unless they have access to a good transportation infrastructure: better prices mean nothing to those farmers if they cannot get those products to the market. In addition, farmers need input that may not be available on a free market. Among these are affordable credit, cheap land and labour, and subsidised seed and fertiliser. (Rapley, 2002)

Weizsacker (1994) describes how this dilemma has been addressed in the developed economy of Germany and how sensible future development needs to be conceptualised. He argues that the market economy makes no sense without transport since it is transport that brings competing goods and services to customers as well as customers to goods and services. Over decades, indeed centuries, much has been invested in developing the package of artefacts that make up the transport infrastructure of Germany and other western European countries. These physical pillars include railway networks, autobahns, electrical systems and the industrial capacity to manufacture vehicles. Social support comes from research and administrative competence provided through universities and research laboratories that ensure the smooth operation, replacement and improvement of road and vehicle technology. Today, Germany’s road and railway systems are well developed and the debate, thanks to public awareness about greenhouse gas-induced global warming, has turned toward the hidden environmental costs and energy efficiency of these two transport modes. The reason for dwelling on this point is because of its relevance for Nepal when we compare roads and ropeways, Nepal’s rail equivalent.

Weizsacker’s research shows that, in terms of primary energy consumption per kilometre, a road-based system is less efficient than a (mostly electric) rail network by a factor or three or four (See Table 14.1). Furthermore, there are large hidden subsidies to roads which railroads do not get. For instance, railways (especially under new privatisation schemes) are expected to pay full price for fixed costs, whereas for roads (and especially for the vehicles driven on them) there are all types of tax and compensation benefits that actually pay for owning a car and driving additional kilometres. This hidden subsidy is responsible for the perverse situation that the Western world faces today: for many food items sold in big city department stores, more energy has gone into transporting them (mostly by petroleum consuming road freight vehicles) than the calories in the food itself. �ettuce imported to �ondon from

�os Angeles, for example, requires 127 calories of fuel for every calorie of food. Iowa State University researchers have shown that fruits and vegetables travel an average of 2,500 km within the United States from the farm to the dining table. In 1997, the UK exported 270 million litres of milk but also imported 126 million litres; this paradoxical exchange contributed significantly to the nation’s ‘food miles’.6

In order to shift to a more sustainable model of prosperity, Weizsacker argues that the meaning of ‘productivity’, which has remained conceptually stuck with the early Industrial Revolution definition as ‘an increase in labour productivity’, needs to be redefined. This is because it has increased by a factor of twenty since 1850 and has already peaked; further gains are likely to be only marginal. What is now needed to meet the challenges ahead for humanity, he argues, is ‘energy productivity’, which can improve by a factor of two with simple measures, by four with considerable effort and by up to sixteen times with significant political commitment. Furthermore, he argues, increases in energy productivity are politically and economically viable if they are designed with the large and mostly ignored informal economy of the Third World rather than industrial use in mind.

The idea of addressing the transport needs of the vast informal economy of the Third World has special relevance for the development of ropeway technology in Nepal. Whatever access villagers in Southern countries have had to markets has been due to cheap dirt roads and equally cheap two-stroke engine vehicles. This technological combine has allowed swathes of geographical space, dubbed the desakota region by some scholars,7 to be occupied by a population that is neither fully rural nor wholly urban. Improving efficiency in this area, or targeting investments to develop transport on the basis of renewable energy, would translate into globally significant macro-economic gains in trade as well as reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. While the nature of Nepal’s database does not allow for conducting an exercise similar to Weizsacker’s for Nepal, we can compare the technologies of roads and ropeways to derive a picture of what a prudent macro-economic policy in this sector might look like.

Nepal remained almost a roadless country until the early 1950’s and even today, many hamlets and communities are several walking days from the nearest roadhead. In the last 50 years, the country has developed a network of about fifteen thousand kilometres of roads (Chapter 2) that connect Kathmandu to major district headquarters and district headquarters to each other and to external markets. Seventeen out of the country’s seventy-five districts, to say nothing of the hundreds of hamlets in the villages of these districts, still do not have a single road. Even in districts that do have roads, it takes a villager several hours of climbing up and down steep terrain to reach them. Many villages in the hinterlands of highways or their feeder roads will never have cars rolling up to their doorsteps. Roads to many hamlets are just too expensive to build, too difficult to maintain and near impossible to replace if a major landslide were to carve off a section of the hillslope.

The only hope of villagers in such places is a technology such as the short-haul Bhattedanda or Barpak gaun-besi ropeway that is cheap enough for villagers to build and operate. The road to Bhattedanda, for example, serves a few thousand farmers. For the tens of thousands in Bhattedanda’s hinterlands, this road is inaccessible; moreover, there is no possibility of feeder tracks being built to connect them in the foreseeable future. Without this infrastructure, hinterland farmers will not be able to make the transition from subsistence farming to cultivating high-value crops or to take advantage of the market by engaging in the development of small-scale enterprises.

Are ropeways an alternative to roads, and if so, how do they compare? The chapters in this book indicate that the underlying ethos in the above question is itself wrong. Nepal’s history of introducing long-distance, multi-stage ropeways under government tutelage shows that such ropeways have not been able to compete with national highways. Roads, or rather the vehicles that ply on them, allow more flexibility to users in terms of time allocation, the shape and volume of goods to be transported, as well as a choice in making intermediate stops. On the other hand, recent successes with short-haul village ropeways demonstrate that, at the local-scale, it is roads that exhibit technical and institutional rigidity while ropeways show significant flexibility.8

Flexible technologies improve the risk resilience of villagers, while inflexible ones render them vulnerable. The correct answer to whether or not ropeways are an alternative to roads is that ropeways occupy an important niche between porters and highways, and that they complement-but do not replace-highways and major feeder roads. They do not rob porters of their livelihoods but support their efforts by reducing drudgery. It is only over the steepest stretches that ropeways are installed; porters are still needed on flat stretches. In fact, more are needed when economic activities promoted by ropeways are intense. Gaun-besi ropeways make a trunk highway much more economic by opening and serving the deep hinterlands. They are an important alternative to building roads over difficult terrain to isolated villages or to mountain project sites with low population density and little future economic activity. They help remote communities end their isolation and increase their commercial transactions with external markets.

Road building in the Himalaya is an expensive activity. Table 14.2 shows that even the cheapest hill ‘green road’9 costs twice as much per kilometre as a ropeway (which our case studies show cost about Rs 1.5 to 2.0 million/km), and that normal, single-lane gravel roads cost four times more. One has to consider the additional fact that the distance between two points in the hills is, in the case of a ropeways, almost as the crow flies whereas for serpentine roads is, on average, three times longer. Furthermore, the cost of a ropeway includes the cost of carriers while the cost of a road does not include the cost of the vehicles plying on it. This means that the initial investment cost of making a hill hamlet accessible to a market by a road could be six to twelve times more than the equivalent cost of installing a ropeway.�

As with the cost of initial investment, the cost of road maintenance in the Himalaya is also much higher than it is in other areas of the world. The steepness of the mountains, the fragility of their geology, and the intensity of monsoon cloudbursts all take a heavy toll. The DoR has a ‘rule of thumb’ understanding that proper, ‘deluxe’ or ‘full’ road maintenance constitutes annually about 20 per cent of the overall capital investment especially, in years of heavy monsoon rainfall.10 The actual cost can be much higher, ranging from over half a million rupees per kilometre for green roads to almost three million rupees per kilometre for metalled highways.

DoR classifies road maintenance into six categories: routine, recurrent, major, periodic, and emergency. Routine maintenance includes general works such as the cleaning of side drains and shoulders and the removal of any obstruction using manual labour.11 Recurrent maintenance comprises patching potholes and repairing side drains, retaining walls, railings and shoulders. Major repairs include the construction of retaining walls, off-road catch drains and check dams, as well as surface correction. Periodic maintenance is carried out every five to seven years and includes resurfacing and reconstructing structures. Emergency maintenance is often carried out after disasters such as landslides and floods.

The allocated budget is never enough to carry out all the required maintenance activities or to achieve full maintenance. Nepal is far from meeting the initial capital cost of building roads; it expects this money to come as aid or loans. This expectation contrasts sharply that in Switzerland (Chapter 1); where the entire national highway system is funded through a retail tax on petroleum that doubles its price.

To defray some of the cost of maintenance, tolls are collected along certain stretches of roads in Nepal. However, there is no well-established government policy of raising funds for maintenance from the use of a road itself, and the amount of money currently generated is too little. For the Prithvi Highway, along the 84 km stretch between Naubise and Mugling, for example, a toll of Rs 25 and Rs 35 for light and heavy vehicle respectively has been imposed. The amount collected over six years is shown in Table 14.3.12 The average expenditure works out to approximately Rs 0.18 million per kilometre, which is much less than the DoR’s estimated requirement for minimal maintenance. Beyond Mugling to Narayanghat and Pokhara, the government has to allocate additional resources directly from the central coffers even for routine

* The estimate is for ropeways that carry goods. If designed to carry passengers as well, a ropeway would still be three times cheaper to construct than an equivalent road. The cost of a ropeway is also highly site specific.

Source: Roads Board, Nepal. Figures rounded to nearest thousand.

maintenance. The Mugling-Narayanghat Highway, which was damaged in the monsoon of 2003 and suffered severe problems during its rehabilitation, highlights the fundamental challenge that road building faces in the Middle Hills of Nepal.

The lack of funds results in poor quality maintenance and a resultant decline in quality. Most roads deteriorate in five to ten years. Seriously degraded stretches cannot be repaired without external assistance, especially when they are damaged by landslides or river cutting. To generate the resources needed to maintain a paved road properly, which includes resealing it every 5 years, about 900 to 1,100 vehicles must drive on it each day and pay a fee of Rs 25 or more. This is because, in order to comply with the local self-governance requirements, users (i.e. DDCs) themselves must fund the maintenance of feeder and district roads. If a heavily trafficked national highway such as the Prithvi Highway requires additional government funding to cover its maintenance costs, what possibility is there that the users of small infrequently traversed roads can meet those costs?

The annual routine maintenance of a gravel road, which does not include major repairs to structures damaged by landslides or slope failure, costs about Rs 22,000 per kilometre. Routine maintenance of the eleven-kilometre gravel road in Bhattedanda connecting Tinpane with Chhabeli (Chapter 8) costs about Rs 242,000 per year. This amount can be generated if 26 vehicles use the road each day and pay Rs 25 per trip, the same amount charged to travel on Prithvi Highway. The actual number of vehicles which traverse this rural road daily, however, is just five to ten. Clearly, poor hill hamlets by themselves cannot afford even the most basic upkeep of the roads that connect them to towns.

In addition to high cost of maintenance, roads invite other problems, too. Once a road connects a village to the market, it is outsiders who begin to operate trucking services because very few, if any, local entrepreneurs have the capital, knowledge or skills necessary to do so. Truck owners then monopolise transportation services and fix fares and schedules to suit themselves. Villagers have to pay to keep truck drivers and owners happy if they wish their goods to be transported. Outsiders thus siphon off the hard-earned money of villagers; and farmers, who are the actual road users, lose out. It is often argued that a road provides market access to agriculture products and, as an obvious corollary, helps farmers earn more. But this simplistic economic expectation is undermined by the harsh reality of a village road’s political economy. In their conventional implementation, roads, ostensibly planned to help farmers, in reality, end up hurting them economically.13

Ropeways, on the other hand, if properly planned, enable villagers to take advantage of the market rather than the other way around. The type ropeway we discuss and advocate in this volume-the gaun-besi ropeway-will not replace roads but exploit them more fully by increasing traffic to and from remote hamlets. Ropeways are cheaper to build and maintain than roads are. The operators of the schemes described in the case studies calculate that the annual costs of simple maintenance (which includes greasing, tightening and cleaning) amount to no more than one per cent of the capital costs. The cost of full-scale operations, maintenance and insurance against natural disasters is estimated to be between five and ten per cent, a figure which compares very favourably to that for single-lane gravel roads built in the hills.

Besides these financial advantages, gaun-besi ropeways also demonstrate significant macro-economic advantages in terms of Weizsacker’s ‘energy productivity’ concept discussed above. While it is difficult to duplicate for Nepal the exhaustive analysis shown in Table 14.1 for Germany (primarily due to the absence of equivalent sets of data), the case studies do indicate that Nepal would enjoy a national energy advantage if it used ropeways. The Hetauda Cement Factory saves two million rupees annually by using its industrial ropeway instead of trucks (Chapter 7). The case study that comes closest to making a reasonable comparison between the two transport modes is that of construction ropeways (Chapter 6 and Annex A).

In constructing the Khimti Hydroelectric Project, a two-kilometre ropeway (capable of being dismantled and used elsewhere) was chosen over an eight-kilometre road. Taking the 22,000 tonnes of goods carried per year of construction as the benchmark, the cost per tonne (including construction as well as operation and maintenance) was three times cheaper for the ropeway (Rs 459) than for the equivalent road (Rs 1,387). The energy cost of the ropeway-to run a 77-kW motor eight hours a day for 340 days a year-was 9.5 kWh per tonne, which is about 34 MJ per tonne of goods transported. The energy equivalent for transporting the same amount of goods by road-with five trucks operating 10 hours a day consuming two litres of diesel per hour-works out to 53 MJ/tonne. This suggest that transporting goods by ropeway is almost two times more energy efficient than transporting them by roads.

The corresponding result for Weizsacker’s study of Germany is that electric railways are eight times more energy efficient for freight and four times more energy efficient for passengers than road transport. The higher efficiency results for Germany may be due mostly to economies of scale. This logic implies that the more Nepal transports goods by ropeways instead of roads, the greater the nation’s overall energy efficiency will be. It is difficult to carry out a similar comparison for the other case studies presented in this book since neither the type of goods nor the roads and ropeways are readily comparable. In any case, certain issues need to be factored in, especially when discussing national policy, if convincing comparisons are to be made. They are discussed below.

Conceptually akin to the idea of ‘food miles’ discussed above is the fuel needed to lift goods from the besi at point A (e.g. Rangrung) to the gaun at point B (e.g. Barpak). Fuel has to be transported to point A from afar, a process that in itself requires a lot of energy. That source is the fuel depot in Amlekhgunj for energy within Nepal, and Barauni, India, or the Gulf countries for energy outside of Nepal. The energy used to power the Barpak Ropeway, however, is produced in Barpak itself. When these hidden costs are included in comparative equations, the energy efficiency of a ropeway economy becomes even more attractive than that of roads.

In comparing roads to ropeways, it is essential to analyse rough equivalents, e.g. gaun-besi ropeways should not be compared to highways and the flexibility and diversity of traffic they cater to but instead to single-lane gravel or green roads. While metalled highways do provide greater flexibility than small ropeways, properly-operated green roads do not have those benefits. Movement on green roads is restricted: there can be no heavy vehicles at any time and no vehicle movement at all during the rainy season. If these restrictions are violated, their maintenance costs shoot up dramatically. This inherent limitation is an important factor in the comparison, because, except during squalls, ropeways are not put out of commission during the monsoon. Furthermore, in calculating total costs, the costs of vehicles and energy are internalised in the case of a ropeway but external in the case of a road. For the former, one 25-kW MHP can operate eight to ten (or more) hours per day lifting goods from Rangrung to Barpak. For a road, there would have to be several vehicles, each of, say, 60 to 90 kW, operating on a stretch of serpentine green or gravel road connecting the two places. Should not such material limitations of a technology be factored into the overall planning analysis?

Another key issue is the period of rural development, which begins with ropeway installation and continues until the ropeway’s goods-carrying capacity is exhausted by increased demand. When that happens, the ropeway will have paid for itself several times over. In the case of a road, however, even when the volume-of-goods transport flow which would overburden a ropeway is reached, the volume of traffic will still not generate enough money to meet maintenance costs.14The limited number of case studies show that this time is much shorter for ropeways. This comparison points to one of the most important lessons of the case studies and this book: gaun-besi ropeways are a prelude to roads, a transport planning complement which would herald road construction only if the traffic of goods and the local economy reached a point that would justify it.

SOCIAL CARRIERS

Introducing a ropeway into a village that has never used such an artefact is not merely a technical problem but also a significant social challenge. One main reason ropeway technology has not become an indispensable part of the Nepali economy is that no one has ever tried seriously to introduce it. Who should try? And what are the social and political factors that govern the diffusion of this technology? Businessmen will not become ropeway entrepreneurs unless proper rules and regulations and infrastructural support are in place to encourage them to invest. The government could invest, but has not. It is simply an administrative institution that responds to the political pressures of the day: it does not have the visionary or missionary urge to propel it in the direction of innovation. If the government by itself is unlikely to provide a conducive environment for ropeway development and the private sector is hesitant to take risks, who will?

The vision of ropeway technology in Nepal needs to be promoted, pushed and implanted into various levels of decision-making by social catalysts motivated by long-term, altruistic concerns such as social equity, sustainable energy policy and environmental justice. There is a dire need for joint ventures of visionaries and risk-taking entrepreneurs in the sector of new and alternative technologies because no technology can embed itself in a society without an appropriate social carrier. The problem lies in identifying who are, or could be, the social carriers of ropeway technology in Nepal and what challenges they will face. Cardwell (2001) articulates the problem clearly:

At the heart of technology lies the ability to recognise a human need, or desire (actual or potential) and then to devise a means­an invention or a new design­to satisfy it economically. �aving done so, the model or prototype has, usually, to be scaled up and adapted to becoming a marketable item. The process of turning the full-scale product into something that satisfies market requirements of safety, cost�profit effectiveness and customer acceptance is a difficult one. . The public have to be told about the new invention and, having been told, to be persuaded that it is worth having. This is not easy: old habits, old loyalties have to be disposed of, fears have to be allayed, the protective conservatism and inertia of most people have to be overcome.

Cardwell goes on to argue that a basic requirement for a technology to progress is that people be receptive to new ideas and inventions, from whichever quarter they may come. Europe’s great inheritance was Roman law, a rational system of thought consistent with the ethos of science, which helped shape the character of Medieval Europe after it was freed from the rule of religion. Indeed, it was rules governing property rights, commerce and insurance, together with a guaranteed minimum degree of individual freedom for all to travel, to learn, to change jobs, to experiment and to invent, which enabled entrepreneurs to invest in the development of technology. Invention also requires a suitable system of training and education in order to supply the skilled technicians without whom there would be no technology.

A simple historical incident emphasises the need for an appropriate world view. After the Indian army built the Tribhuban Highway in the 1950s, Kathmandu Valley became accessible to vehicular traffic but it had no trucks. Interviews with old timers indicate that one member of the royal family, the second brother of King Mahendra, did eventually import twenty-five trucks to transport goods,15 but then discovered that there were no Nepali truck drivers to be found. The drivers he hired were mostly Sikhs displaced from Pakistani Punjab after the partition of India in 1947. The single event of choosing a particular technology-trucks-was the most significant factor responsible for the growth of the small but diligently prosperous Sikh community which exists in Kathmandu today. Half a century later, truck owners and drivers from Nepali communities have replaced the Sikhs and form a strong political lobby in the transportation sector.16 The popularity of hot-water solar panels and biogas plants in Nepal offers another instructive lesson. In the 1970s, the Swiss appropriate technologist Andreas Bachman, who worked in Balaju Yantra Shala, helped promote the skill and capacity of local Nepalis to design and construct both these technologies. Gradually the market took over, and solar panels now dot Kathmandu’s landscape. Similarly, the promotion of biogas plants in Nepal is largely a market-led venture, pushed by social catalysts both Nepali and foreign.17

What the above stories indicate is that behind every technology choice, a constellation of forces, each with its own set of interests, is at work. These forces generate their own pressures on the body politic and precipitate their own set of wholly unforeseen consequences. This section of our essay develops the argument that ropeways have to be approached, as other new technologies have been, from a ‘social-construction-of-technology’ perspective. One obvious set of social carriers of this technology is industrial interests, who would find in ropeways new avenues for expanding their market for the provision of goods and services. These include, as mentioned before, the micro-hydro and rural electrification industry as well as the suspension bridge profession.

Other social carriers might be innovative hoteliers who have identified scenic hilltops as sites for constructing resorts or meditation centres that value aesthetically pleasing but isolated surroundings. Their objective of preventing free-for-all, haphazard growth is met better by the restricted access that ropeways provide than by roads. Government agencies such as telecommunication, radio and TV stations, meteorological or space observatories as well as the army need to locate themselves at strategic vantage points that are not frequented by mass commercial interests. These agencies, too, would be ideal social carriers of ropeway technology as if they are a single purpose user of a hilltop site, it would be prohibitively expensive to build a road and practically unjustifiable financially in view of the limited national budget.

The numerous porters in Nepal who live a life of drudgery, carrying goods either commercially or for themselves, would also welcome ropeways introduced to save them from backbreaking climbs. It is estimated that at any one time on a non-monsoon day more than three million people are walking the trails of Nepal Himalaya carrying some kind of load.18 Even securing daily necessities like drinking water and carrying out essential tasks like grinding corn entail uphill-downhill trudges. The hope of finding a partial solution (because fully obviating the need for portering is impossible) to such drudgery would turn villagers into supporters of ropeways. Ropeways would not do away with portering altogether-as helicopters have done -but would complement porters’ efforts only in the most labour-intensive and time-consuming sections, the steepest stretches referred to in rural Nepal as mutu phutne ukalo or naakai chhune bato. 19 Porters, however, are an amorphous group who by themselves, are unable to catalyse change. Since porters have been marginalised and rendered fatalists by the market and the political processes in Nepal, not until activists organise them into a coherent voice will they have the collective strength to bring about change.

To catalyse the interests of the fatalistic masses as well as of potential investors, what is required are NGOs and citizen-based groups who work for rural development and for whom alleviating the drudgery of rural life and securing better market access for rural produce are prime concerns. If a proper coalition is formed among civil society, ropeway entrepreneurs and enterprises engaged in electrification and tourism, the ropeway as an industry could be championed in Nepal. Advocacy by such a coalition would include lobbying the government to introduce laws conducive to ropeway promotion, building a suitable institutional support mechanism with banks, and redefining the meaning of national interest in transportation as comprising clean energy provision and foreign exchange savings.

What are the difficulties an NGO which promoted ropeways would face? Bijker (1997), in his analyses of the developments of the ordinary safety bicycle; bakelite (plastic), which revolutionised the insulator industry; and the fluorescent tube, which transformed the lighting industry, argues that the success of a particular technology is determined by the social construction of that artefact. He asserts that a technology is successful not so much because it ‘works’ but because it has been accepted by ‘relevant social groups’. Furthermore, before that can happen, a certain pattern of interchange has to be established among a technology, its inventors or promoters, and the society at large that has to internalise it. Technological change is as much a social process as a demonstration of mechanical proficiency; a successful engineer is also an economic, social and political wizard.

In considering the means to promote ropeways, it is instructive to use Bijker’s framework, which is part of what is known as ‘social-construction-of-technology’ studies, to understand how an artefact becomes a successful technology. Bijker argues that the character of technical development is trial-and-error and evolutionary rather than instrumentalist and goal-oriented. Technological change is a social process permeated with the politics which economic power entails. Because various factors have to coalesce if an artefact is to be embedded within a society as a valuable technology, its introduction entails an element of uncertainty. One cannot be completely sure that its benefits will accrue primarily to the targeted group. Just as a technology can be used by the powerful to further their interests, it can also be exploited by the less powerful. A good example is how environmentalists use scientific data and the Internet to champion their cause. Similarly, space research has produced new material and equipment that have been found useful in fields as diverse as hospital care and mountaineering. Part of the social construction of technology is the ascription of multiple meanings to it, meanings that acquire stable connotations only after a period of social engagement.

Bijker asserts that introducing any technology entails an ensemble of relevant social groups that see themselves as benefiting from or being marginalised by that technology. If these opposing groups enjoy ‘interpretive flexibility,’ a kind of socio-technical democracy, they begin to give meaning to the artefact in their own ways by defining new uses for it. Even those who would, in a straightforward design sense, be marginalised by the technology look for new ways to cope with its introduction. Over a period of time, ‘closure’ is achieved as a consensus emerges about the dominant meaning of the artefact. An example in Nepal is the two-wheeled tractor (also called a power tiller) designed by the Japanese as a practical answer to the mechanical ploughing of narrow terraced fields. Over a period of time, Nepali consumers of this technology changed its use: the mini-tractor, instead of replacing bullocks for ploughing, has become ubiquitous as a goods-transporting taxi, especially in small cities like Bhaktapur.20

A similar redefining of the meaning and purpose of a technology by grassroot users can be seen in Western India’s hard rock areas, where diesel pumps are used to pump groundwater. While engineers and loan giving agencies insist that three­horsepower (HP) pumps are sufficient, farmers insist on buying (irrationally, in the view of the planners) ten-HP machines. Further investigation, however, has shown that in actuality, farmers are far from irrational: they use the over-capacity equipment for a few months to pump groundwater, but during the rest of the year, when irrigation is not required, the machine is slightly modified and fitted onto a makeshift chassis to become a perfectly functional (and unlicensed) rural truck.21 Users, it seems, turned out to be their own planners and economists better than their formal, urban counterparts were for them.

In our case studies of different ropeways, one issue that has not, and will not in the immediate future, achieve closure is whether ropeways should be used to carry goods or people. Since passenger ropeways demand a higher safety factor, and hence are more costly than goods-carrying ropeways, planners and designers familiar with Nepal’s rural poverty argue against building them (Chapters 10). Users in Nepali villages, however, have a different idea (Chapter 12). They assess their personal risks in, and benefits from, riding a goods-carrying ropeway with respect to traditional ghirling and judge them to be no more risky. Both in Barpak (Chapter 9) and in Bhattedanda (Chapter 8), users have found the risk worth taking and, despite protests by managers and engineers that goods-carrying ropeways are not designed for passengers, enjoy the effortless ride up to their villages anyway.

The answer that may emerge with the closure and stabilisation of ropeway technology in Nepal perhaps will be a hybrid: ropeways may need to incorporate both passenger and goods transport functions. Such solutions will require major design as well as operating procedure innovations by the entrepreneurs who promote ropeways. Bir Bahadur in Barpak (Chapter 9) has already been forced to innovate: he introduced restrictive procedures like higher prices for passengers and the signing of risk disclaimers. When his damaged ropeway is repaired, how to accommodate the demand for passenger services is bound to be his primary design question for the hardware experts as well as the management gurus.

Bijker argues that the closure and stabilisation of a technology happens as the dominant meaning of an artefact emerges and the ‘pluralism’ of other possible values to users decreases. It results in its achieving fixity of meaning, which in turn reflects the playing out of power within the ‘technological frame’ of the ‘socio-technical ensemble’. For the safety bicycle, closure and stabilisation even required an act of parliament to decree that the bicycle was a means of ‘carriage’ and hence entitled to a place on the road. Bijker’s ‘technological frame’ is analogous to the ‘paradigm’ of Kuhn (1970): it refers to the set of current theories, tacit knowledge and design methods as well as to users’ practices and to the substitution functions that those engaged within the ambit of the technology see as problem-solving. This structural environment, in which the further development of the artefact will take place, is where economic and political negotiation among relevant social groups occurs.

In the resultant dynamic interplay, there is initially no single dominant group, no single or identification of the problem, and no single structuring of a solution. Resources are available to a range of actors, all of whom pursue different innovations, modifications and uses. Over time, one dominant group is able to insist that its definition of both the problem and its solution be accepted. This group will also control many of the resources which society allocates for improving the technology and for further problem solving. In the late 1940s, when Toni Hagen (Chapter 1) reflected at the fork in the transport development path in Nepal, the sector still enjoyed ‘interpretative flexibility’ and Nepal could have had more ropeways and hydropower and fewer roads and oil imports.

Unfortunately, the scale tipped in favour of roads, thereby marginalising the ropeway and its development. Reversing the process today means fighting what Bijker calls the ‘obduracy’ of entrenched road technology. That battle will have to be spearheaded by what he calls ‘low inclusion engineers’, often a younger lot who are still willing to question the basic socio-technical frame, identify presumptive anomalies and enrol new social groups to politicise technological choices.

Other scholars who study the introduction of new technologies make similar arguments about the importance of recognising the social construction of those technologies if they are to be successfully embedded among users in a society. Mc�aughlin et al. (1999) describe how management notions of identifying user needs and incorporating them into technological systems bear little relationship to the contingencies, variations and cultural mediation that users introduce during final implementation. Systems could not be black-boxed during the stabilisation process because users repeatedly re-opened the artefact to explore new uses and interpretations not foreseen by planners and designers. Instrumentalist approaches to management, which are based on assumptions about an organisation’s goals and mission statements, are translated and transformed at the level of the organisation’s base membership. Mc�aughlin et al. recommend that considerable organisational labour-or investment in social software-be incorporated in securing the sustainability of a technology. This can be done by allowing end users to be actively involved in the process of embedding a new technology in the daily lives of communities or corporations.

Sachs (1992) describes the power of users in ensuring the success of one technology over another. In studying how cars conquered railways in Europe, he argues that the culture of the rising middle-class bourgeoisie reinforced a ‘technological design gradient’ which favoured individualism over common means. Thus, the cinema gave way to television, the laundryman to washing machines and the railway to cars. With the railway, the passenger was constrained by fixed schedules and routes, with the car, the nouveau riche felt freedom in space and time. They did not have to share the same space with the lower rungs of society, and enjoyed the additional bonus of a sense of speed.

Similarities exist between the predominance of the car with the large-scale growth of groundwater pumps in India. Access to groundwater reduces agricultural risk, which is particularly high in command areas where the supply of water by canals is not very reliable. Increasing reliability of canal water supplies requires the collective action of the upper and tail-end land owners. By using pumps, however, individual farmers, particularly wealthy ones, can begin the gradual process of agricultural intensification and accumulation of assets independently of others in the same realm of space and time. Innovative farmers, farmers with exposure to new ideas and sufficient land on which to test them (i.e. wealthy farmers) were the initial adopters of pumps despite declining water levels, pollution and other negative externalities. The net result is that groundwater irrigation is booming in India (despite severe environmental consequences) while surface irrigation systems are stagnating and experiencing large financial losses.22

In steps which reinforced the sense of independence among the new bourgeoisie in Europe, banks provided investment capital, governments embarked on infrastructure (highway, etc.) building, and designers raced to produce faster engines to cater to the increased demand. In Germany, the industry also took up a nationalistic anthem: if we don’t race forward with the development of faster cars and better highways, our industry will suffer and the French industry will take over the abandoned market territory. The net result of the infrastructural support for the car by the state was the relative marginalisation of railways and the rending of the social fabric held together by foot traffic.

This transformation of the European landscape was made with much insidious social violence, but both before and after the transformation the society was, and remained, European. In other socially less-prepared cultures, cars have been described as ‘Trojan machines’ that force the people to subordinate themselves to unaccustomed time rhythms, to absorb an alien industrial work ethic, to accept increasing levels stress and to regard these changes as normal or even as ‘progress’. Ullrich (1992) describes how, if cars are seen as exosomatic organs, they have to be considered together with their attendant infrastructural network of technical, social and psychological conditions, without which they do not work. He writes: workshops, insurance, police and ambulance services, lawyers, automobile factories, warehouses for spare parts, and much more besides. And on the psycho­social side, one needs people who will conform to all the installations and facilities and institutions and who can function within them. And so one needs streets, conscientious petrol station and garage repair owners, and in general, the expert and diligent industrial worker, which in turn means schooling, disciplining and yet more schooling. Every industrial product like this brings with it its corresponding requirements and they can only function with their associated infrastructure and the psycho-social preparation of the people.

In such a bewildering complexity of infrastructural and psycho-social conditions, how does one assess the value of a technology? We have tried, in a rudimentary way, to compare the values of roads and ropeways in the preceding sections, and have seen how riddled with uncertainty and risks the process is. The intrinsic uncertainty means that different protagonists-or different social carriers-can use different convictions and interpretations to bolster different cases. In such a contested context, Schwarz and Thompson (1990) use the Cultural Theory framework to deconstruct technology assessment. Their arguments reinforce those of Bijker, Sachs, Ullrich and Mc�aughlin et al. that the existence of social solidarities in addition to managers are crucial to the success of a technology. The four organising styles of Cultural Theory consist of the managerial hierarchy, the individualist entrepreneur, the critical egalitarian social auditor and the fatalist conscript. Each has its own view and definition of what technology means. The conclusions of Schwarz and Thompson are summarised below:

Cultural Theory, as we have seen, sets up a fourfold scheme of cultural pluralism, based on four distinct social contexts and their concomitant moral commitments and strategies. It is a pluralism, moreover, that is essential, in the sense that each cultural bias – towards market solutions, towards hierarchical solutions, towards egalitarian solutions, and towards fatalist acceptance – is not viable on its own. Individualists, for instance, need the hierarchists to enforce the law of contracts, the hierarchists need the fatalists to sit on top of, the egalitarians need the inegalitarian excesses of the individualists and the hierarchists to criticise, and so on.

So this notion of an essential, but strictly limited, cultural pluralism can be used as a conceptual tool for recognising the divergences in social assessment­of technologies and policies­by those who make up the arena in which our technologies (along with everything else that makes the social world go round) are hammered out. We can visualise this four-fold scheme as a cultural overlay that can be superimposed on the sociale kaart so as to provide a deep explanation of where all the features on that map come from (and to alert us to the possibility that some may have been excluded). �ur central argument is that, whenever a policy debate is characterised not �ust by technical uncertainty but by structural uncertainty as well, we should analyse it in terms of this cultural overlay.

Schwarz and Thompson argue that there is a need to resist superficial and patronising ‘fixes’ that treat structural uncertainties in the social embedding of technologies as merely technical. In the early stages of the development process, no one can know much about the outcomes and their uncertainties, but each social solidarity constructs its perception of risks and benefits in its own way. Schwarz and Thompson argue that the hubristic technology assessment that we have become used to needs correcting by introducing the idea of flexibility (or inflexibility) to cope with obstacles to sustainability when they cannot be fully anticipated. This means that, when there is a persistently polarised debate and an ominous clash of contradictory certainties among different social solidarities regarding the benefits or costs of a particular technology, it is important to search for those voices that have somehow been shut out of the debate. Unfortunately, these are often those of the silent users and the questioning social auditors.

POLICY ARENA

The ropeway lies in the blind spot of Nepal’s economic planners and managers. If this policy myopia is to be treated, what remedies are needed? Nepal’s small and medium hydro development sector has witnessed an intense debate that provides some obvious lessons. One of them is the role of the catalystic social auditor who contests policy terrain. The obduracy of road technology and its entrenchment in the transport policy arena suggest that change will not come from within that sector and that critique from outside is needed to force us to look at alternatives. The potential social carriers of ropeway technology in Nepal identified in the previous section need to be catalysed into action. The experiences highlighted in this book indicate that the task may be easier than imagined.

It is said that nothing succeeds like success, and the gaun-besi ropeway model has already demonstrated its technical and economic viability. This lesson should make the task of those promoting ropeways as an alternative much simpler; proposals that complement hill roads with powerful economic synergy should be easier to sell. Policy advocacy might need to be pluralised to match the similarly pluralised social terrain: each of the four social solidarities of Schwarz and Thompson’s pluralised categorisation above needs a slightly different message and a different policy nudge.

The individualist market must be shown that there is profit to be made in this venture. Knowledge about successes must be disseminated to more ‘Bir Bahadur Ghales’ in different villages. And more village leaders should be made aware that the meagre funds that flow from the centre (HMG/N provides five hundred thousand rupees annually to each VDC) can be more effectively spent on ropeways than on ill-designed roads that get washed away in the very next monsoon after they are constructed. Another source of funding for rural development is found in districts where hydropower plants are located. New HMG/N hydropower policy, a result of the activist campaigns for alternatives in the aftermath of the ill-fated Arun-3 project, requires that ten per cent of HMG/N’s royalties from electricity produced be siphoned back to the region and district which produces it.23 �ocals can probably be convinced to invest some of their own resources as well to establish ropeways if relevant industries come forth with pilot ropeway ventures. Successful examples such as Bhattedanda and Manakamana ropeways are more effective than mere exhortations alone.

Also catalysing entrepreneurs and leaders into action may be ‘clean energy’ groups which promote activities that fire the imagination. For instance, Bijker explained how the bicycle was stabilised as a technology when improvements in its utility and safety were counterpoised with bicycle races that caught the public imagination. The victory of the car over railways in Europe was also won in the minds and hearts of many with car races such as the Grand Prix. Similar is the story of the bicycle with races sponsored to cater to the individualist urge for competition. If, as Toni Hagen mentions, the Swiss Army could set up a Barpak-type ropeway in nineteen hours, would it be possible to have competitions (sponsored by Nepali and international ropeway manufacturers) to have competitions errecting modernised and reliable ghirling in the Nepal Himalaya? Might such publicity also attract the support of Nepal’s village leaders, local politicians and the fatalistic masses, the drudgery-ridden porters?

Social auditors also need to catalyse the hierarchic government machinery to engage in alternative ways of thinking. In a country that is unable to recover even a portion of the normal maintenance costs of irrigation and highway infrastructure (to say nothing of capital recovery), any avenue that would lessen the burden of the government should be welcome. To avoid the environmentally damaging drain of foreign exchange to buy petroleum imports associated with road construction, it is sensible to promote gaun-besi ropeways fuelled by Nepali hydro energy. Table 14.4, which shows the sales of petroleum products in Nepal during the FY 2002/03, provides some insight into what a national commitment to replace non-renewable petroleum with indigenous hydropower would entail.

�ess than a quarter of the country’s population had access to grid-supplied electricity in 2004 even though more than ninety years has passed since the first hydroelectric power plant was built in Nepal. Grid expansion to scattered hill settlements is difficult and small hydropower plants do not have many productive end uses. Ropeways provide a powerful way to increase the productivity of isolated hydro systems (as well as of the national grid) and thus to assure that more Nepalis have access to affordable electricity. If the political actors in the country commited themselves to a renewable energy policy, then they could tax petroleum products with the express objective of building a fund for ropeways as well as small and medium hydropower development and rural electrification. There would be two fundamental assertions in such a move: first, it would be a concrete national commitment to developing the country’s renewable hydropower to replace imported non-renewable petroleum; and second, it would signal the transfer of urban surplus to marginalised rural areas.

While the consumption of diesel in Nepal has declined in recent years due to Maoist-engendered violence and a transport slowdown, the consumption of both petrol and �PG has shown an annual increase of fifteen to twenty per cent. If a one per cent tax were levied on all petroleum products and the money allowed to accrue in a ‘renewable energy replacement fund’ that included other possibilities such as hydropower or rural electrification or ropeway development funds, the sum raised from consumption during the FY 2002/03 would amount to 255 million rupees. This is equivalent to the capital required to construct almost fifty Barpak or Bhattedanda type ropeways annually. If the government were heavily committed to a renewable energy policy and levied a five per cent tax on non-renewable petroleum products, a billion and a quarter rupees could be raised every year.

Another catalysing policy advocacy activity could be a study of metal and manufacturing industries in Nepal (as they pertain to MHP, ghirling and ropeways) in relation to past practices of sales and import taxes as well and to the new VAT. T he purpose would be to demonstrate the efficacy of value-added to Nepali skills by this proposed ropeway-MHP-suspension bridge combo industry if it is saved from double taxation. A Nepali entrepreneur who has invested in ropeways made this argument (Chapter 11). The Hetauda-Kathmandu ropeway proved to be very useful during disasters. If it is no longer needed for Kathmandu, would it be more useful elsewhere? One Nepali entrepreneur has, in fact, proposed to dismantle its different sections and use them in other parts of Nepal.24

One argument this book makes is that we need to re-think rural development in terms of accessibility rather than just in terms of roads built. Such a re-orientation requires that national plans and economic surveys describe rural population in terms of their access to markets. In addition to indicators such as health posts or teachers per thousand population, official reports should speak of hamlets as being so many hours away from markets. Such initiatives need to be actively pushed and promoted if they are to become even faintly feasible.

Unless someone pushes gaun-besi ropeways as a cause, changes are unlikely to occur. Despite the fact that ropeway technology came to Nepal in 1924, societal changes that would have created incentives for its growth did not occur and its use remained uninspiring and limited. The dominance of the centralised road transport sector was one reason ropeways did not take off. The road became the archetypal example of koselee bikas-something gifted from outside instead of fostered through local creativity catalysed by incentives for localised improvement in access. The use of ropeways as an end use of electricity also offers prospects for conserving the environment by creating avenues to minimise dependence on natural resources like forest products. This connection is evident in the case of the Bhattedanda Milkway. An arranged marriage between hydropower and suspension bridge industries funded through indigenous financing offers the opportunity to promote ownership, creativity and the invigoration of Nepali development efforts, which are currently stuck without a vision. Promoting ropeways that localise Nepal’s development efforts may also help promote effective and meaningful democracy by correcting the imbalanced economic gradient in favour of marginalised rural hinterlands.

NOTES

1 These rates are based on Gyawali and Dixit (1996).

2 See interview with the Director General of the Department of Roads: ‘Tarai will be less than two hours away,’ Nation Weekly 25 July, 2004, Kathmandu.

3 Bitter battles are fought to ensure that a new road stops at one’s village and goes no further, leaving all other villages beyond it as helpless trading hinterland. There are tremendous economic benefits for roadhead villages.

DIPAK GYAWALI AND AJAYA DIXIT

Source: Ropeway in Nepal