"His Majesty's Government, taking into consideration the pressure on the environment of the Khumbu region and to lessen the pressure in the area and to conserve the environment, has decided to regulate the number and size of expeditions." So reads the official explanation for the decision taken in 1993 to restrict the number of members on mountaineering teams going to the Khumbu region, while limiting the number of teams on Everest itself, and to raise the royalty for climbing Everest from U$ 10,000 to U$ 50,000.
For quite a while there had been a clamour for a restrictive policy, including from Edmund Hillary, who had called for a five-year moratorium on Everest, although this would have been quite hard to achieve since the Chinese had no intention of closing the mountain from their side, international opinion notwithstanding. Thus, 'long overdue' was what many people concerned with mountains in Nepal felt about the change in the regulations.
The government's logic was simple. Instead of having a dozen or so teams paying ten thousand dollars apiece, if two or three expeditions paid fifty thousand each, the national treasury would still be receiving more or less the same amount. Mountaineering activities would be diverted elsewhere in Nepal to compensate for business lost from Everest by trekking agencies. The local economy would suffer a bit due to the absence of the hundreds of porters that swarmed up to Khumbu every climbing season (that was partly what the new regulations were designed to check), but would benefit from the increasingly popular policy of 'ploughing back' the revenue into the area earned from the peaks. And all would be well.
A rosy scenario, indeed! Unfortunately, mountaineering has not shifted to elsewhere within Nepal. It has instead shifted to Tibet. This past spring saw 11 expeditions tackle Everest from the northern side against only three from Nepal. (Of those three, two had to be billed 'clean-up' expeditions in order to get around the 'one-route-one-team rule, since all three took the South Col route. The regulations clearly state: "Only one team shall be permitted to climb Sagarmatha by each separate route in one season." But this being a 'policy matter' it can easily be circumvented by a cabinet decision. Why the council of ministers should be called upon to look into such inconsequential matters of deciding whether an expedition is a 'clean-up' or not, beats reason, since clean-up or otherwise, the U$ 50,000 royalty has to be coughed up.