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.

6 - ICIMOD uses Nepalese soil against China

Sources doubt ICIMOD Director General Dr. David Molden (American) and Director Programme Operation Dr. Eklabya Sharma (Indian) are operating anti-China activities from Nepal and the name of ICIMOD is used for this purpose. For this mission, they have reorganized the Kailash Sacred Landscape Project (KSL) allowing their spies to visit china, run ant- China activities in Tibetan part of China and form anti-China groups in northwestern districts of Nepal – Humla, Dolpa, Achham and Bajura among others as well as grow anti China feelings in Indian part of Kailash Landscape.

When envisioned, KSL was seen as an opportunity to bring three countries – India, China and Nepal together to promote transboundary landscape cooperation. Given the complex relations and administrative complications between India and China, all parties agreed that Nepal is the neutral venue to run such activities and Dr. Krishna Prashad Oli, a Nepalese national was selected as the Project Coordinator through international competition.

However within few months of visit of ICIMOD Former Director General Dr. Andreas Schild to India in November 2009, who surrendered to save his position as Director General and made ICIMD a typical pro-Indian organization, several arrangements were changed:

•  In January 2010, Dr. Eklabya Sharma, an Indian National was appointed as Acting Director Programme Operations (for two years) at ICIMOD ruling against ongoing recruitment process in which  four international experts were interviewed for this post and one of them was supposed to be selected. This was the first case in ICIMOD’s history in which a non-candidate was given the post and all formal candidates who were more than capable were trashed for no reason.
• Despite extraordinary performance Dr. Krishna Prashad Oli (Nepalese) was replaced by Dr. Rajan Kortu (Indian) as the KSL Coordinator and role of Dr. Oli was minimized making him unable to do anything against the unfair management. To support Dr. Kotru, two other Indian Nationals - Dr. Gopal Rawat, Dr. Nakul Chhetri were added to the team.
• In December 2012, ICIMOD new Director General David Molden appointed most controversial Dr. Eklabya Sharma as full flexed Director Programme Operations without any announcement (please note Dr. Molden was selected as ICIMOD DG in June 2011 with strong reservation from Indian Government represented by Mr. Mr Tishya Chatterjee). ICIMOD staffs say, they were not even updated internationally about this decision. Interestingly, few months before this decision, Dr. Sharma was portrayed as Indian intelligence agent in a Pakistani newspaper. According to it, Dr. Sharma uses ICIMOD generated and managed data to develop plans against sensitive neighbors, mainly China and Pakistan and passes such sensitive information to India for further actions.
• Since then the team of Eklabya Sharma and Molden is running several activities against China for which Nepalese soil is used.

According to sources, below is the list of ongoing activities:

•  In the Indian side, Spiritual rallies and religious trips are organized aiming to develop religious extremism among the people who can then be prepared as rebellion for Free Tibet movement.
• In the northwestern districts of Nepal – Humla, Dolpa, Achham and Bajura, the team is forming group of people if Tibetan origin who can be mobilized against China in the name of Free Tibet movement.
• In Tibet, ICIMOD official are making unofficial visits to recreate Free Tibet movement among the Chinese Buddhists living in the areas close to Kailash. To keep their activities away from Chinese governments, ICIMOD officials travel to Tibet in Tourist Visa (in which other activities are banned), however they are heavily involved in social and scientific research defying norms of people traveling to China with Tourist visa. The illegal travelers include the ICIMOD DG David Molden as well who visited Kailash in September 2013.

These are few suspicious activities we have recorded so far, but people believe there is much more going on.

To stop anti-China activities from ICIMOD, it is essential that David Molden and Eklabya Sharma are suspended from ICIMDO and the KSL project responsibility is given to Nepalese capable staffs. The Government of Nepal should take smart steps to prevent conspiracy against our good neighbor China misusing Nepalese soil.

ICIMOD - 'for' or 'against' Himalayan people?

What do you expect from a regional intergovernmental organization like the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) who is tasked to work for better livelihood of mountain people and ecosystems in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region by promoting regional cooperation among the countries in the region (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan) and developing partnership with other mountainous countries across all continents for  global benefit. Headquartered in Kathmandu, Nepal, ICIMOD presents itself as a learning centre promoting knowledge, policy formulation and actions through organized research, better governance and equitable benefit sharing approaches.

However, sources reveal, in contrary to the mandated approach and expectations from it, the centre is involved in several other activities that overrule the law of the Government of Nepal (host country), promote position, gender and color based discrimination,  manipulate institutional realities, advance suspicious activities in selected member countries, and partner with corporate houses that are found environment unfriendly and suspected for their involvement in trade of plant and animal products violating provisions associated with indigenous knowledge and Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Sources add, the governance at the centre itself is questionable as many staffs are recruited without meeting minimum criteria and fully ignoring, avoiding and overruling the Centre’s agreement with the Government of Nepal and Board of Directors approved institutional documents that should guide activities at the centre. Furthermore, several staffs at the Centre are questioned for violating and abusing diplomatic immunities and privileges offered thus affecting the economy of the host country and creating unnecessary divides between national and foreign staffs working at the centre. The Centre’s approach to work with media is also questioned as some sources close to centre find them fishy. Sources claim most of these activities are taking place with direct protection and instructions from Centre’s  Directors themselves, which is a serious threat to Centre’s progress as a well disciplined entity. Contacted ICIMOD staff and well-wishers revealed whoever questions on these malpractices, they get removed from the Centre without any logic. They referred some organised conspiracy against honest staffs who raised these issues and requested to keep their name private.

Urging to expose these bitter realities we have received 33 compelling real stories from concerned people, that we will be relieving one after other, with the aim of informing respective governments, donors, media and civil society and create pressure so ICIMOD management takes necessary actions to correct the mistakes as soon as possible so it can flourish as a clean and healthy regional institution in the years to come.

Invitation to Join: Himalayan Voice – A Voice that cannot go unheard

Dear Change-makers, Dear Lovers of the Himalayas,

We are happy to share that the team of the Climate Himalaya Initiative, the Environment Professionals’ Group and the Asia Pacific Youth Task Force on Rio+20 (APYTF), together with media, youth and civil society groups from South Asia and China, is now starting a citizen journalism campaign - Himalayan Voice: Battle against institutional corruption in the Himalayas. To be formally launched in November 2013, the campaign is expected provoke discussion on transparency, human rights, indigenous rights and right to information in the sustainable mountain development sector, eventually promoting social auditing of government and other public institutions and form advocacy group in desired communities to ensure such bodies are economically efficient, environmentally responsible and socially accountable to the people. The campaign will have strong virtual presence along with some satellite networks at country level, largely led by young sustainability forerunners and backed by media professionals writing on sustainability and governance issues.

During the pre-planning study it is realized that every year billions of dollars is spent in Himalayan countries – Bhutan, China, India, Nepal and Pakistan, without any concrete outputs. A large chunk of resources is utilized by multilateral organizations by themselves or through other intermediary international and national organizations, whose actual benefits never go to the local communities. Interestingly, many of such initiatives are neither registered with the governments nor properly followed-up by the donors. In our estimate about 80-90% of such resources are spent in staff salary, travel and administration of international agencies and big national NGOs and rest less than 10% is channeled further for the real work. Another layer of partners (national NGOs) further take big chunk of money away leaving less than 5% of the resource for the real work. Sadly, thus left 5% also dries away without any use due to poor governance system in the local communities and district level administrative units. Until a clear mechanism is developed to track all sustainability funds and spent through well institutionalized integrated sector driven and community led initiatives, sustainable development will never be achieved in the Himalayas. Himalayan Voice will attempt to voice these issues among donors, policy makers, and in the development communities in these countries.

To start with this, we are currently looking for list of journalists and advocacy groups who work against environmental corruption and environmental governance with footprint in ‘South Asia + China’ with global influence. If you know any of them, we appreciate your support in linking them with us or providing lists of relevant contacts or referring to the websites where anti-corruption contents can be populated without much editing. We will be covering sustainable development sector with a major focus on climate change and associated institutional mechanisms, governance and corruption. We aim to make aware the governments, civil society in the region as well their donors from the west about the nature and level of corruption, abuse of power and how that is triggering jeopardizing environmental issues in the Himalayan countries. 

For more information and to share relevant updates you can bring on board, out virtual platforms are:

Discussion Forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/environment-professionals

Exclusive ClimateDebates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CHIClimateDebates/

Network beyond Boundaries on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/171967553141/

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/guardhimalayas

Get periodically Updated on our Blog: http://transforminghimalayas.blogspot.com/

Report your issue in public on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/againstclimatecorruption/

Report your issues privately at climatehimalaya@gmail.com and/or transforminghimalayas@gmail.com. We ensure highest level of seclusion for the privately reported issues. Such stories will be published on our blog and disseminated to our audiences globally.

After combining all the platforms above, currently we are connected to around 10,000 stakeholders. Help us grow more, grow fast!!!

Sincerely,

Team Himalayan Voice

"A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead