In 1974, the British Overseas Development Administration (ODA) sent five academics to Nepal to evaluate the potential socio-economic impact of a section of the East-West Highway, which it was building at the time. The agency was already committed to a programme of road construction in Nepal, with this section of the highway to be followed by the construction of roads in several other parts of the country. As such, the ODA expected that the academics it had sent would produce a report extolling the benefits that the new infrastructure would bring to the local populations – in a sense, legitimising the entire project.
To much consternation, the report, completed in 1976, was heavily pessimistic about the benefits that the project would bring. The authors went beyond their mandate to provide a detailed analysis of how the roads would have widely varying effects on different social groups and classes in Nepal. They included criticism of the country's political economy from a radically left perspective, which held that Nepal's underdevelopment was rooted in deep structural problems in its economy, and that development projects funded by international agencies would contribute only to enriching the country's elite.
That the ODA would not be happy with the report's results could perhaps have been foreseen. More surprising was the rousing affect the report (modified and published in 1980 by three of the original five researchers) had among sections of the Nepali intelligentsia at that time, especially among those actively involved in opposing the king-led Panchayat regime. That the 1980 book, Nepal in Crisis: Growth and stagnation at the periphery, was banned for a period is an indication of its influence, and of its place in Nepali history.
Nepal in Crisis utilised the analytical tools and framework of neo-Marxist 'dependency theory', as originally developed by Andre Gunder Frank and other political economists. While the authors were the first to apply this framework to Nepal, a number of leftist intellectuals, both foreign and Nepali, subsequently used the same tools to explore diverse aspects of Nepali economy and society. Sociologist Chaitanya Mishra is one of those whose work lies within the space opened up by Nepal in Crisis. In this new collection of selected essays, written over the past two and a half decades, the influence of dependency theory, as well as that of the closely related 'world-systems theory' of Immanuel Wallerstein, is visible on almost every page.