MINISTER YADAV ASKS ELECTION COMMISSION TO IGNORE OPPOSITION REQUEST Kathmandu, 4 July: Communication Minister and Acting Chairman of MJF Ganatantrik Raj Kishore Yadav wrote to Election Commission Tuesday asking it to ignore a letter of Nandan Kumar Dutta informing the Commission claming a majority of the party’s central committee replaced Yadav officiating for jailed JayaprakashPrasad Gupta. Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai has also not responded to Dutta’s communication asking the government chief to sack Yadav. nnnn GOVT. CONTROVERSIAL INITIATIVE TO HANDOVER MANAGEMENT OF STRATEGIC TIA TO INDIAN COMPANY Kathmandu, 4 July: The government has begun homework to hand over the management and upgradation work of the Tribhuwan International Airport (TIA) to a foreign company after India’s Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Limited (IL&FS) expressed interest in it, Sangam Prasain writes in The Kathmndu Post.. One of India’s leading infrastructure development companies, the IL&FS has approached the government to manage and upgrade the TIA under the ‘Build, Operate, Own, Transfer’ (BOOT) model. Investment Board (IB) sources confirmed that the IL&FS has approached them for the same. However, everything is in the preliminary stages, the sources said. “There has been an informal discussion with the Indian company on the issue,” they added. The government is planning to make such a handover through the Investment Board. The TIA upgradation is one of the 14 projects that have been given to the IB by the government recently. An IL&FS representative in Nepal said the Indian company is currently conducting a study on the TIA on its own. Interestingly, the IL&FS interest has come at a time when the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) is upgrading the TIA with assistance from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and its own resources. CAAN is currently looking after the TIA management. The work on the country’s sole international airport is currently being carried out through ADB assistance of $80 million (US$ 70 million in loans and US$ 10 million in grants). The government has also invested $30 million in this project. The IL&FS held informal discussions with CAAN on the matter two months ago. “It was a preliminary discussion,” said Tri Ratna Manandhar, the director general of CAAN. Manandhar said they discussed the issue of management of the loan that the ADB has given for the TIA upgradation and the revenue returns. “The IL&FS is willing to assume all the loans signed for the airport improvement project,” said Manandhar. At a time when a majority of countries have found private sector engagement in airports more viable, we should not be too much critical of such a proposal,” Manandhar added. The TIA’s annual revenue currently stands at Rs 3 billion. “Our concern is that the annual revenue should be more than what we are getting in case of privatisation,” he said. The IL&FS had expressed its interest to invest in Nepal during Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai’s India visit in October last year. The government and the IL&FS had also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) during that time. “TIA was one of the projects IL&FS had shown interest in,” said FNCCI President Suraj Vaidya, who was one of the witnesses of the MoU. “The IL&FS had also shown interest in the KTM-Tarai Fast Track and the Bhairahawa Regional International Airport, among others.” The idea of handing over the TIA management to a private firm is not new. The Tourism Ministry had earlier planned to separate the TIA from CAAN, hand over the airport’s management to private companies and make CAAN a policy-making and regulating body. In the past, Malaysian and Indian companies had also shown interest in the TIA management. The TIA, which was designed to handle 1,350 passengers per hour, has to at times process over 2,000 passengers an hour. The TIA handled 4.28 million passengers in 2011, up by 7.33 percent year on year. Nnnn TRANSPORT FARES BEING HIKED Kathmndu, 4 July: The Ministry of Physical Planning, Works and Transport Management has said that the proposed new transport fares would be endorsed only after consultation with transport entrepreneurs. The ministry’s statement follows moves by the Department of Transport Management to hike passenger fares by 3.75 percent to keep up with rising gasoline prices, The Kathmandu Post writes. “We are trying to be clear on the need to jack up fares and the way they are calculated,” said Tulasi Prasad Sitaula, secretary at the ministry. He added that since the transport sector was directly related to the general public, the ministry was taking the fare issue seriously before making any decision. The department has sought the ministry’s go-ahead to hike passenger fares by 3.75 percent and freight charges by 4-4.50 percent. The department said that the proposed increases were based on the scientific fare fixing system adopted by the government. According to Sitaula, the ministry and the department would meet with the National Federation of Nepalese Transport Entrepreneurs and the Federation of Truck Tanker and Transport Entrepreneurs soon. The issues to be discussed include the impact of frequent fuel price hikes, the reason behind the failure to implement a ticket system for commuters and the trend of rounding off the fares after they have been increased. Sitaula said that increasing the fare to a round figure has become a serious matter. “Even though it is normal for fares to go up whenever fuel prices rise, we also want to discuss a permanent way to avoid frequent adjustments,” he added. Giving an example of fares being rounded off, ministry officials said that when the department increased the rates the last time on March 20 from Rs 13 to Rs 13.59, vehicle owners were charging passengers Rs 14. The department has been using a scientific fare fixing system to adjust ticket prices for the last four years. The system gives a weightage of 35 percent to fuel and 65 percent to non-fuel factors. Non-fuel components include bank interest on loans, cost of spare parts, staff salary and administrative and maintenance costs. nnnn