Tuesday, January 15, 2013

High-ranking H&B officials sucked in as probe deepens


KATHMANDU, JAN 15 -

High-ranking officials of H&B Development Bank are being sucked in as the police probe deeper into a good for payment cheque scam. Police had arrested another eight employees of the development bank including immediate chief operating officer Mahesh Bhusal and finance head Nirmal Nepal who have been subsequently suspended. Nepal is the brother of the chief accused Niraj Nepal, the Kuleshwor branch manager, who is in police custody.’

The manager of the Kuleshwor branch of H&B has been charged with issuing good for payment cheque s to two traders despite insufficient funds in their accounts, resulting in losses to the bank running into millions.

Other officials who have been rounded up by the police are branch officer Parsuram Devkota, senior assistant Rima KC, assistants Manisa Poudel and Binas Dangol, office secretary Binod Acharya and Yek Narayan Devkota. The traders involved in the fraud Manoj Chaurasia and Jaya Kumar Yadav are at large.

On Sunday, they were remanded in custody for four days by the Appellate Court, Patan to enable the police to conduct further investigations. A police official at Metropolitan Police Range, Hanuman Dhoka said they had arrested them on the basis of the statement of Niraj Nepal.

“Following the arrest, an initial statement has been taken from them. The government lawyer will take their statements on Tuesday,” said the police official. An official at the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Police, which is investigating the case, said that more bank employees were arrested after they were found linked in the fraud case.

As a result of the scam, the bank incurred a cash loss about Rs 200 million and it is receiving a claim for over Rs 500 million for good for payment cheque s.

H&B has submitted a report of its internal investigation to Nepal Rastra Bank which has mentioned how the fraud took place, the amount involved  and the bank’s liabilities, said a central bank official.

The bank’s internal investigation has found that chief accused Nepal issued good for payment cheque s in the name of Chaurasia and Yadav after they collected deposits from other individuals in their accounts. But the bank failed to withhold the amount after issuing good for payment cheque s which resulted in the withdrawal of all the money they had deposited.

Moreover, it has been found that a number of finance companies and cooperatives accepted the good for payment cheque s as collateral and provided loans to the fraudster duo Chaurasia and Yadav.

According to H&B officials, Chaurasia is a regular borrower of H&B while Yadav is just a depositor. The finance companies and cooperatives issued credit to Chaurasia and Yadav despite the central bank’s ban on providing loans against cheque s.

For this reason, the central bank has suspected that there is a racket involved in the incident and has frozen the bank accounts and shares of those involved including Niraj Nepal and senior officials of the financial institutions involved in providing the loans.

Meanwhile, the persons who have deposited money in the accounts of Chaurasia and Yadav enticed by high interest rates are in trouble now. They have been picketing the offices of H&B Development Bank and Nepal Rastra Bank demanding that the good for payment cheque s they had been given be cashed.

H&B and the central bank have told them that it will be possible to cash the cheque s only after the police investigation is completed. “After completion of the police investigation, we will make payment for genuine cheque s as per the central bank’s directive,” said H&B CEO Jasoda Sainju.

Nepal, India to jointly promote domestic religious sites


KATHMANDU, Jan 15: Nepali and Indian travel agents are jointly launching a travel package to promote Lumbini and other Nepali religious sites, and increase the flow of foreign tourists to Nepal.

The religious tourism package is being launched at the Nepal-India Joint Travel Mart scheduled to begin in Lumbini from Tuesday.

The package aims to promote major Buddhist religious sites in Lumbini and Kathmandu, as well as Bodhgaya and Sarnath of India.

Lila Bahadur Baniya, manager of Nepal Tourism Board (NTB), who is coordinating the event, said around 125 travel-related companies from India and Nepal, airline companies, hotels based in Kathmandu, Pokhara, Chitwan and Bhairahawa are participating in the mart. Out of these, around 30 are India-based companies, he added.

The Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation, NTB and the Embassy of India are jointly organizing the event, which will also be attended by senior officials of the Ministry of Tourism of India, and representatives from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar tourism authorities.

Along with the business to business session, the event will also feature a three-day symposium, which will seek ways to launch the joint tour package through Nepali and Indian travel agencies and tour operators.

“The tie-up will be crucial for us to bring in more Indian tourists to Nepal,” Baniya said, adding, similar event will soon be held in Pokhara and Kathmandu.

The figures provided by immigration office at the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) show around 165,000 Indian tourists visited Nepal last year, which was 27.5 percent of the total foreign tourists received by the country.

Though neighboring India receives around one million Buddhist pilgrims every year, Nepal, where Lumbini, the birth place of Lord Buddha, lies, does not even receive 10 percent of that crowd, according to the organizer of the event.

To promote Lumbini, Nepal organized Visit Lumbini Year in 2012, during which 509,073 tourists from 92 countries visited the birth place of Lord Buddha. Of this, 113,195 were Indian, 52,671 were Sri Lankan and 28,480 were Thais.

Made-in-Nepal : apps for your smartphones

KATHMANDU, Jan 15: Five minutes before the usual electricity cuts, Pranita Nepal’s iPhone blinks with notification from ‘BattiGayo’ and she’s mentally prepared for the load shedding. A 20-year-old student, Nepal shares that the app has made it easier for her to access information about load shedding hours. Plus, she can customize the notifications as early as an hour before the load shedding starts; check the schedules for other places other than one’s own and plan accordingly. “The only thing,” says Nepal, “is that it isn’t always up-to-date.” 

BattiGayo is a Nepali-made app owned by Idealaya which notifies its users about load shedding schedules.

“Our main target with apps for Nepal has been to create simple yet useful apps which are mostly problem-solving tools,” says Pravash Karki, cofounder of Idealaya. Comprising a team of designers and developers who are using their creativity to solve problems, Idealaya has also released another application, MediBook, which helps one to locate the nearest hospitals in Kathmandu and allows the access of emergency contacts from any place.



Nepali applications are gaining popularity. Take, for instance, BattiGayo, which has been downloaded 16,000 times up until now since its release and is downloaded, on average, about 1,000 times per week.

“This is based on a new technology and we have very few developers in Nepal,” says Karki who adds that the problem of funds is one of the main challenges for Nepali app developers.

“Creating an app might be a onetime thing but sustaining it can be costly. From the devices which have to be used, especially for iOS, to the platform for launching and testing these apps, everything is expensive,” he shares.

The few others in this field also agree. “The resources needed and developer’s costs are very high in this,” says Bishal Ghimire, 28, a self-taught app developer who works with Windows Phone, iPhone and Android platforms.

“App developers can turn rich overnight if their apps click with the users. But in Nepal, at present, the market isn’t very fruitful,” shares Ghimire who believes that this is partly because of the mindset of ‘downloading and using for free’ and partly due to the lack of mechanisms which allow users to buy these apps.

As a developer, Ghimire also faces hurdles due to the lack of proper data, which he can use easily to disseminate through apps. He got interested in mobile apps because a mobile has now become a device which is in everybody’s hands, and so he can share his apps with many people and become known that way. More than to generate money, which is difficult to make in the current scenario, he’s creating apps as a service, to help people.

“The main problem of our local market is that it isn’t possible to sell the apps,” says Deepen Chapagain, CEO of Nepways, a software development company which owns the mobile app ‘nLocate’. “Even those who want to buy these apps in Nepal don’t have the mechanisms to do so,” he adds. 

There are other constraints for app developers focusing in the local Nepali market, be it the Internet services available or the user acceptances. Chapagain shares that with nLocate, which is an application that allows people to access information about places and events in one’s locality, the team that developed the app has worked around the constraints to create an application which optimizes the available infrastructure and technology.

nLocate has been downloaded 5,000 times since its release in the market one and a half months ago, and Chapagain says, “Although the user acceptance is small, it’s increasing in a high rate.” nLocate is also adding a feature whereby businesses can use the app to dispatch their customized information to users by subscribing to this service from the developers.

The market response is what encourages Nepali developers, despite the major hurdles they come across.

“The trend in which Nepali apps are coming up is good,” shares an optimistic Chapagain and he’s especially impressed with the app that aims to help users socially.

Idealaya’s Karki shares that the concepts of these apps are commendable. He, however, says, “Most Nepali apps I’ve seen aren’t visually appealing. I find that they are weak, design-wise.” He also says that rather than creating more apps, the emphasis should be on providing useful and sufficient information through an app to the users.

nLocate, which allows one to easily locate places in the highly dense Kathmandu City, BattiGayo which alerts people about power-cut hours, or Nep News through which users can access numbers of newspapers with a simple click, are just some names of the emerging apps made by young Nepali developers that are slowly being seen on the smartphones in Nepal.

While for its users, these apps have made life easier; for its developers in Nepal, however, creating and sustaining apps for the local market, given the limitations, isn’t a simple task.