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Today's Chatpat: October 11th, 2023

1. Our health minister is once again in the news for yet again the wrong reasons. Earlier, he had promised to give protesting health workers ropes, so that they could hang themselves. This time, he wants poor and needy patients to suffer as he has removed hundreds of health professionals working in Bir Hospital on a contract basis.

50 MBBS doctors, 2 specialists, 17 doctors working in the Emergency wards,155 staff nurses and 10 staff working in radiology and pathology labs are now without jobs, affecting the services at Bir Hospital. According to media reports, the hospital has also removed 155 beds, further denying medical services to patients who need to be admitted for further treatment.

The minister says that he has no funds to pay those staff. Well, our PM spent 70 crores visiting foreign lands and in a month, more than 50 VVIPs were on foreign vacations costing crores of Rupees from the state treasury. Bir Hospital is one of the most crowded national hospital and sees inflows of tens of thousands of patients everyday seeking medical treatment at affordable prices where most medical equipment are idle due to lack of maintenance and even skilled technical staff to operate them.

2. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has announced that nine internet service providers (ISPs) have evaded taxes worth Rs 246 crores in the past ten years. According to the ministry, Worldlink owes the government 125 crores, Vianet 26 crores, Subisu 26 crores, Classic Tech 23 crores, TechMinds 23 crores, Mercantile 9 crores, WebSurfer 7 crores and a few other ISPs a few crores each.

Our question is what was the ministry doing for the past ten years? We all know that majority of the ministries ask for bribes from service providers and even the tax department officials seek to lower the tax payments in exchange of Dashain kharcha. Recently, the CIAA won the case against tax officials for allowing corporate houses to evade taxes worth Rs 900 crores. The officials were sentenced to nine years in prison and double the fine but not a single business house or its owners faced any punishment.

3. It seems that CIB is much busier these days handling financial crimes than other heinous ones. Cooperatives across the country are shutting down after embezzling thousands of crores of Rupees from depositors. A recent case is that of Deurali Co-operative. Twenty thousand depositors have suffered after the financial institution skimmed off Rs 100 crores and failed to pay interests for the past few years.

CIB has arrested Deurali's chairperson, Rabindra Chaulagain and the surprising thing is that our police can't seem to find anything owned by Rabindra anywhere. The most that can happen is he will go to prison for ten years and then he won't have to pay a dime to anyone and will enjoy his loot like Ichccha Raj Tamang is doing. Tamang is accused of stealing Rs 500 crores of his depositors' money.

4. The United Nations has cancelled the visit of its Secretary General which was supposed to take place on October 14. The Hamas-Israel conflict seems to have postponed the visit to Nepal. The United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres was here in Nepal last in 2007 when he was fronting the UN's refugee agency.

We really don't understand why the UN honcho was planning to visit Nepal? Was it to thank Nepal for hosting the Bhutanese Refugees all these years before their successful resettlement to third countries or to ask how stupid our netas can be, to scam its own citizens to make them fake Bhutanese refugees and make extra money even when the UN had already closed down the resettlement thing?

5. Eden Hazard has announced his retirement at the age of 32. He was without a club after Real Madrid had released him last year. Hazard could have made a few extra millions playing in Saudi Arabia but it seems that he doesn't want to do that and instead might take up a coaching career in the near future.Hazard played for Chelsea, Real Madrid and for Belgium over the years.

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