ALL currently prevailing international academic fads make their way in time to the corridors of power and planning in Kathmandu. National policies are quick to accommodate prevailing concepts, theories and Approaches to development. Since the 1950s, our deve-lopment goals have consecutively em-phasised agriculture, then industry, then "balanced growth", then "regional development". Subsequently, "growth oriented" development gave way to "equity oriented" development and fin-ally to "integrated rural". Such progres-sion, if one might call it that, seem as inevitable as the turning of the wheel of fortune.
Recently, the focus has shifted from growth and GNP orientation to a concern for people and equity. The emphasis, on paper -at least, is to be of direct assistance to those on the lowest economic strata the rural poor, the small farmer, the deprived. Women fall in the lowest economic strata under any type of classification. The thought that development activities .directed to the rural people will automatically include women has been borne out to be untrue. The beneficiaries of social, political, government and development activities have in fact overwhelmingly been "the male rural poor". The "trickle down effect", in this case from men to women, has worked no better at the household level than it seems to have at the national level.
Unthinking use of Western categories of "housewives" and "money earners" without looking at the Nepali rural household has ignored and distorted the actual productive roles of women. Nepali women have thus been more or less by-passed in development. The functional roles of "housewives" and "money earners" apply only to an exclusive minority of the elite, but it is the members of this small elite who are the immediate receivers or disbursers of foreign aid and development. And they are what they are either by virtue of western education and influence, or, in a few cases, the anachronistic left-overs of the elites of previous times.
The concept of "housewife" in Nepal assumes the woman as a leisurely lady limiting her activities to household and domestic chores, categorised either as reproductive or unproductive. This excludes all those activities of the vast majority of Nepali women who do crucial, productive, but unpaid activities such as food processing, manufacturing for family consumption, household construction, water and fuel collection, hunting and gathering.