When you have power, you have responsibility – not only the means but the responsibility.

Dr. Pukar Malla is Co-founder of Daayitwa, an NGO that works towards inclusive economic growth focusing on empowerment of rural communities while also creating innovative solutions to involve youth in the field of governance. Dr. Malla returned to Nepal after 19 years of rigorous academics in the United States, receiving his Bachelors in engineering and economics from Swarthmore. He then studied for three years at Cornell, attaining his MS/PhD in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Business Management. Finally, he earned his MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, also leading the Harvard Graduate Student Government as its elected President. Paresh Khetan of B360 caught up with Dr. Pukar Malla to discuss leadership, youth in Nepal and the objectives of Daawitya.

What are the biggest challenges for youth who are trying to become leaders of Nepal and build a better country?

Young people are facing many challenges. The one that strikes them the most heavily is the culture of authority driven decision making and implementation. Whether you look at the parliament, a big company or an NGO, a majority of them are led by people who are more experienced, that is to say, older people. When one tries to exercise leadership, one faces the culture that says to him or her it is not your time yet; you are not listening; you are trying to change things too fast; you are not respecting me; you are not respecting our culture. Many times we hear these authority figures publically say “Youth are the future of the country.” I have a problem with that. I think that they should be thinking and working towards “youth are the today.” When you think of youth as the future, it’s sort of saying “I am the present and after me it’s you.” So when they say that the country is in the hands of the young people, they don’t really mean it. This culture is more obvious in the case of women, who living in a patriarchal country face an environment in which men who hold a lot of power are making the decisions. This is where innovation is needed – socio cultural innovation.

So you would say these problems are more cultural rather than structural?

I think it’s inherent in our culture. Government and especially political representatives are a manifestation of where people are. They cannot get elected unless people vote for them. Generally, they will not do something the people don’t want them to. If you think about it, if we have a huge mass of people that want to avoid paying VAT, what does that mean for a politician? He or she is going to look at where people are and going to respond to this. I think that a large part of what you are calling youth disenfranchisement is a result of where we are socio-culturally. Having said that, I think more could have been done by the government which holds the power. When you have power, you have responsibility - not only the means but the responsibility. I tend to think that there is a lot more focus on the means than the responsibility, a lot more focus on power than on progress. Are we truly investing in building the capability of youth so that they can replace current leaders? That’s a tough one, no? In Austria a 31 year old is about to become the vice chancellor. I was thinking about why this cannot happen in Nepal and I think it is because of this strong authority driven culture. The social construct is such that it would be very difficult. I mean it is difficult for young people at home. How do you deal with your father or your mother? Both of whom have such strong ties to their cultural, religious roots. If you’re trying to innovate, it’s hard. Especially when that gets magnified at a huge level, then you begin to see the challenges that young people face. I do think that the government is making efforts, but it’s just not enough. Through Daayitwa, we were asked more recently to delve into “how can the department of labour boost youth employment to curb the heightening immigration of youth, especially in the agriculture sphere?” We looked across the various programs that existed in the ministries of youth, industry, agriculture, finance and women and also the NPC. We looked at all the different elements that are important to boosting youth employment. When we looked at this matrix what we found was that there are so many policies in place. The government has been thinking about various actions, development, it has instituted the youth self-employment fund; the government has put in place this mega-startup, what they call it, the challenge fund. The government has the National Youth Council. There are numerous policies in place. But there are two questions. Have these policies turned into programs at all? Because you may have a policy and no money has been allotted for them to take shape. For instance, employment policy 2070, very little of that has been implemented and not surprisingly, we see a lot of young people leaving as opposed to coming back. And the second question is: How have they been implemented? A lot of the times we find gaps between the goals and the reality. The projects are not implemented in a manner that truly captures the imagination of that project to begin with. I don’t want to say that the government has not done anything, because it has. They have systematically prioritised the youth in different policies and vision statements. How good have these policies been on the ground is the question.

Would you say that your summer fellows who work directly with the government leave feeling empowered or disillusioned?

We call them Daayitwa fellows, fellows because we want them to learn about and exercise leadership. The whole idea is that of a campaign of self-responsibility. I see two very strong undercurrents in terms of the relationship between youth and authority figures, youth and government. There is one of dependency and it is so extreme that I would choose to play carrom board until the government provides livelihood training and opportunity for me. This happens so often. If you go to different towns in the Tarai, you see young people just waiting for the superman. There are a lot of dependencies. Provide us with education, provide us this or that. Then there is also a culture of counter-dependency which is particularly high among urban youth. They’re saying most of the things you do are wrong, you are corrupt. You’re ineffective. I think it is time for you to give up all your powers. So it’s like this. There is a culture of dependency and of counter-dependency. The fellowship program since 2013 has been trying to work on nurturing a culture of inter-dependency where young people work with authority figures with government on innovative solutions to existing public policy problems. The fact that we just finished the 7th cohort of fellows and so far, 78 fellows have worked in 20 public agencies and with 25 parliamentarians. It says a lot about the government’s interest. The government has given space, which we appreciate, and on the other hand, young Nepalis across the world are also applying. We don’t want to provide a silver platter to our fellows and then they just leave having done their assignments. We don’t want this to be a course you are taking at a top-notch college. It is a course that you are taking in Nepal, where maybe the teacher isn’t of the quality that we expect, where you find uncertainties, where a government official might not be interested in your project, where you yourself may not know what you want in life. We want them to undergo the real experience; this is truly a leadership journey for them. There is a technical goal at the end which means a report that analyses a public issue. But arriving at the report is a whole journey marked with a variety of challenges, from not being able to find the supervisor to not being able to draw the type of data that you need from target groups. There are lots of challenges that an individual faces during this leadership journey and we want them to go through it so that they can exercise leadership when faced with these challenges, so that they can arrive at this policy brief. In other words, when you go through this journey what ends up happening is you begin to feel the different layers within the government you begin to see who this joint secretary really is, not for what he or she may be known for or what he or she appears to look like. You begin to unravel why does this person think this way and not just what. There is a why in this. There are five layers of why to every reality that we notice and by just looking at the surface you only see so much. So when you begin to respect and see the perspective of the other person, then you begin to develop empathy. When you develop that empathy and begin to work on results, the fellows leave mostly excited about public service. This is why it is public service fellowship. Some of our fellows have applied for civil service exams. Wherever they go, they keep this experience with them and they encourage other people to apply as well. Almost about half of these fellows have returned to Nepal. Of the 78 Daawitya fellows, 40 are in Nepal in different places doing different kinds of activities. Having gone through the fire, you come out stronger.

How did your views of Nepal change when you went abroad? Did you always envision coming back?

When I left Nepal 19 years ago, I knew I wanted to come back. I do not know why, how, or what. I didn’t have these answers. I just knew I wanted to. First, I pursued a career in engineering for a whole decade and began to slowly realise that I was much more interested in the people’s side of technology to the point where I decided to steer away from the field and become the bridge between technology and people innovation. I pursued a public administration degree later on and went into the development field. I worked at the World Bank in Washington DC for three years and again began to realise that I was not truly happy with what I was doing in the sense that I began asking myself - Am I making the type of impact I care about? In these questions I found myself gravitating towards my identity, because a person is happiest when he or she does something that flourishes his or her identity. For me that was being a Nepali. This is why I decided to come back because I think by being here, by being able to work on my identity, I would be happy. This is why I decided my daughter would be born in Nepal. Although we could have had her in the United States, we wanted her to be born here. You asked, how my views have changed, I think as I have begun to become more realistic, in this process I need to work hard everyday to not at the same time lose the innocence. It is easy to lose that right? What you are really becoming is a cynic when you say you are becoming a realist.That happens to a lot of people in Nepal. I think that in the last 19 years one thing that I have noted very often is the power of the youth. How young people can come together and create new realities for themselves and for their communities. So this is something I have begun to appreciate more. I have also begun to appreciate more the power of entrepreneurship and also the need for economic development. I think that there is a lot of work happening in Nepal in the way of social-political empowerment which is very important. In parallel we also need to begin focusing more on economic empowerment, there’s not enough emphasis put there. I would have probably been on the camp of people who wanted to become social-political advocates, but I think that this is why I have begun focusing more on economic empowerment, which is what Daayitwa does.

Finally, a more personal question... In terms of our current political position, are you worried that the ideologically opposed groups competing for power will create divisions amongst the population?

If we go back to where we were two weeks ago, if we looked at where the Maoist party were, I don’t think they were far left; when they began, they were. But most of the hardliners are not a part of the party. The very fact that Dr. Bhattarai was once trying to form an alliance with NC says a lot, maybe they are not ideologically opposed. How do you even work with someone who thinks absolutely diametrically opposed? My point is- before the alliance formation, I don’t think the political parties were very much ideologically far apart from each other. If you look at the spectrum, the Maoists began at far-left and over time they have been cultured towards center-left. Ideologically, I don’t think the parties are very different. In practice, we see them behaving similarly. I also think that if there are two parties, there is more political stability.  We are going to learn what this will mean. One of the biggest things that hurt our nation a lot is the formation of these endless coalition governments every 9 or 10 months. I think that having a party win gives us more stability and at the end of the day,I still believe that people have a lot of power. At the end of the day, the politicians are representing and serving the people. Because people have a lot of power, they can choose, just as we are going to now. The key thing is for the people, led by civil society, to keep holding the government accountable and in the process we need to do our work as well, we need to be responsible citizens. If we all say I’m going to pay VAT, it’s very unlikely that a politician that is corrupt will get elected. There’s many changes happening all at once, I think it will take the next five years for us to see what of this makes the most sense and then the people will have all the data to make the best decisions but I also think that the next five years it’s not like any of these people will use their power to do something obscene. There are various control structures in place as well and my view is that there will be a force which is more social-democratic and a force that will be more liberal-democratic. We will see. Overall, I am optimistic as long as you and I live up to our responsibilities.

Anything we missed?

One thing we did not talk about that is at the heart of what Daayitwa does which is our work on entrepreneurship. Our thinking is that we want to work towards economic empowerment. Our goal is a Nepal where every young person has opportunities for a prosperous future. So, there are three types of activities. The first cluster of activities is working with entrepreneurs in rural Nepal. We identify these work-oriented entrepreneurs and work with them for a whole year and accelerate them into becoming investment-worthy. This work on the ground informs our second cluster because we can only support so many entrepreneurs in a year as an NGO. So our second type of work is the learning from this informs policy-making. This is where our fellows come in. We use the learning from the ground to work with policy makers. Not all ideas that a fellow presents translates into decisions. This is where we do some action research.We work with former bureaucrats and universities like Harvard so that some of these ideas can turn into decisions. Thirdly, all these activities are not a bunch of projects for an NGO, for us, these are efforts towards creating a global campaign for an enterprising Nepal. We organise a lot of leadership courses from half a day to a yearlong—courses for politicians, bureaucrats, youth, private sector, and civil society. When you put all this together, this is a campaign. There are three entities, Daayitwa which is an NGO, Nepal Leadership Action which is a non-profit company and Daayitwa US which is 501C organization. So there are three entities which are a part of the campaign. To clarify, we are very much focused on economic empowerment through the acceleration of rural entrepreneurs.