8 - ICIMOD management threatens staffs and plays with their emotions - Gross National Happiness dropped

Learning from Bhutan, Kathmandu based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) assured its staffs to introduce the concept of Gross National Happiness in the context of a development institution. Started in 2009/2010, this idea was never implemented seeing increasing level of staff dissatisfaction, management bias, color, nationality, race, gender and positions based discriminations. Weak and controversial leadership of Director General (DG) David Molden and Director Programme Operations DPO) Eklabya Sharma has made ICIMOD extremely unpleasant place for staff to work at. Sources claim new positions are created and old positions are collapsed just to accommodate people close to David and Eklabya and remove others who become fear factor for them. Such appointments and removals do not follow any standard guidelines and neither ICIMOD Board of Governors is notified correctly. Same happens when it comes to staff promotions, travel permissions and assigning project responsibilities. David and Eklabya duo are developing a chain of their loyal people at the institutional level so all their wrongdoings can be hidden and they can easily misreport to ICIMOD member country representatives and donor communities.

When asked, a staff replied – ‘David Molden is a typical scientist who doesn’t have any idea and experience about institutional management and by selecting him as Director General of ICIMOD, Board has made a stupid decision. Likewise Eklabya Sharma is a highly political person who has always tried to develop his own team in ICIMOD and is marginalizing other staffs at ICIMOD. This way ICIMOD staffs are now polarized, one who think ICIMOD is deteriorating every next day and external intervention is needed to improve the situation and other ones who are voiceless and do not want to comment anything. But what is common between them is, none of the staffs (except few loyalists of Eklabya and David) are happy at ICIMOD and the situation may outbreak any time’. Another staff added, ‘on the top DG Molden has threatened several staffs during staff meetings not to go against him. Even though there are several unethical, illogical and invalid decisions DG has made, the staffs are not able to speak up. We need our governments to take this issue up and remove the corrupt and intellectually weak management’.

Sources add, to ensure all the staffs are vulnerable and management can impose anything they want, the DG and DPO have illegally recruited a Dutch national as Human Resources Unit head, replacing other staffs, appointed people close to them as ombudsperson ignoring the result of the staff nominations and voting, brought several other loyalists in key positions and prevented staffs from contacting donors and member country representatives and micromanaging all the projects so staff do not get chance to use any power and influence people outside ICIMOD, who can eventually ICIMOD management. This way majority of ICIMOD staff are trapped within vicious circle without any easy escape and ICIMOD member countries need to intervene in order to ensure good governance at ICIMOD.