It is even bad that the chairman of the Corp, Ravi Kant Jaipuria, who flew to Kathmandu in a private jet to address a press conference last Friday repeatedly pointed not only toward unfriendly business environment but also raised serious questions over the security of senior staff of the group working at the Pepsi bottling plant in Kathmandu. It was also informed at the press conference that the Maoist-affiliated workers, who were agitating for nine days demanding the removal of a newly-appointed shift engineer, are also barring technical staff from entering the plant premises while some of the them were forcefully locked up in their offices.
Despite the crippling obstruction, the management flatly turned down the demand of the workers citing that it is the management’s prerogative to appoint senior staff, not the workers’. The issue related to the security of senior staff of a multinational company is a very serious one because if not tackled promptly, it can immediately erode confidence of other nine major multinationals operating in the manufacturing sector in Nepal.
It is an unfortunate coincidence that the freezing of further investment came barely a week after the Corp, which brought American food chain KFC and Pizza Hut to Nepal, declared making additional investment worth Rs 1 billion in Nepal, mainly for the expansion of bottling capacity of Pepsi in the Tarai region.
At a time when the Constituent Assembly is most likely to make constitutional arrangements to welcome foreign investments in almost every sector of Nepal’s economy, the announcement by RJ Corp has come as a blow to the fragile economy that badly needs more foreign as well as domestic investments not only to generate additional employment but also to check the rapidly widening trade deficit.
Despite the fact that Nepal’s rigid labor law, which is infamous for favoring laborers than investors, has been the biggest bottleneck to expand industrialization in the country for more than a decade. Surprisingly, successive governments seem less bothered over tackling depleting investor confidence. Even more disturbing is that neither the government nor the private sector’s apex body or trade unions have shown any interest in finding an amicable solution to the ongoing problem at the Pepsi plant. We urge everyone concerned to take the issue seriously and act immediately to restore the battered confidence of, both, national and international investors before it is too late.
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