Between the bus stop and the school, a distance of maybe six hundred metres, there are now four shops selling more or less the same things: biscuits, noodles, soap, cooking oil, phone credit, sweets in jars. Three of them opened in the last five years. All three were opened by men who came back.
At least one will close this year. Everyone on that road can tell you which one and they are usually right.
The policy apparatus around Nepali labour migration is almost entirely a departure apparatus. There is an orientation before you go, a licensing regime for the agents who send you, a welfare fund you contribute to on the way out, a bilateral agreement with the destination, and an entire literature about the remittance corridor. All of it faces one direction.
There is nothing for coming back. Not nothing in the sense of underfunded — nothing in the sense that there is no institution whose business it is, and if you ask at a district office what a returning migrant should do, you will get a leaflet about starting an enterprise, and the leaflet will be sincere.
So a man arrives at Kathmandu airport at forty-one with eight or eleven years behind him and some money, and he has about eighteen months before the money is gone or committed. What he does with those months is the single largest determinant of whether the eleven years produced anything durable, and it is the phase about which the state has the least to say and collects no data at all.
What most of them do is open a shop. And the reason is not that they are unimaginative.
A shop requires no licence anybody enforces, no employees, no Nepali-language paperwork beyond a signboard, and no institutional relationship with anybody who might refuse him. It can be run by his wife when he is not there. It is on the road where his family can see it, which — I have written about the houses on that road and it is the same logic — is doing work that has nothing to do with margin. And crucially he has watched other returnees do it, which is the only market research available to him, because there is no other source of information about what this road can support.
The information problem is the whole thing and it is astonishingly cheap to fix. Nobody on that road knows how many shops the road can carry. Nobody can know, because there is no register — the ward has a list of registered businesses that is years out of date and does not include most of them, and the three men who opened shops each made the decision in a week, on the basis of having seen a shop.
A ward-level list of what exists, updated once a year, published on a board outside the ward office, would cost almost nothing and would tell a man with eleven years of Gulf wages that there are already three grocery shops within six hundred metres. It would not stop him. It would mean he could not later say that nobody told him, and I think a meaningful fraction would use it.
The counterargument I take seriously is that the state has an appalling record at anything resembling picking businesses, and that returnee-entrepreneurship programmes worldwide are among the least effective interventions ever evaluated. That is true and it is the reason I am not asking for a programme. Training a man to write a business plan is a way of making him responsible for an outcome determined by a road he has no information about. A list is not training. It is the thing he was trying to estimate by looking out of a bus window.
The shop that will close is the third one. Its owner was in Qatar for nine years and he is fifty-three, and he told my uncle that he had thought about a poultry operation and had decided it was too complicated, which I believe, and which I have thought about since, because complicated in that sentence meant that he did not know anybody who had done one.
