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For 72-year-old Arjun Thapa, being homeless was easy. Begging in front of the Mahankal temple abutting Tundikhel in the heart of Kathmandu, he was his own boss. Originally from Lalitpur, streets gave Thapa a home as well as a sense of freedom.
He doesn’t remember exactly when he first came to the street. “It could be over 15 years ago,” Thapa guesses. “After the death of my parents, my close relatives took away all my land and property. I then became homeless.”

For some time after that he worked in a meat shop as a butcher, but the owner didn’t pay him. He thought he would do better by begging where pay was guaranteed. Thapa says he was doing just fine. Then, he had to shift to a homeless shelter.

His ‘suffering’ started when the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC), marking its 25th anniver­sary on December 15 last year, decided to rehabilitate all the home­less in the city. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli had announced on dif­ferent occasions that Kathmandu would be made beggar-free, not the least because of the high number of homeless deaths on the streets every winter.

The KMC started ‘rescuing’ the homeless from around town—Mahankal, Bhadrakali, Pashupati, Sankata, and other places. Nepal Police, Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, Manav Sewa Ashram and some other social orga­nizations supported the campaign.

Somebody recorded the rescue operations at night and made it viral on social media, which drew mixed reactions. Thapa was also picked up as a part of this campaign and taken to a shelter home in Hetauda run by Manav Sewa Ashram, an NGO work­ing for homeless folks. Thapa stayed at the shelter for around a month.

“I didn’t like the place. It was worse than the streets. They misbe­haved with me there several times,” he says. That was not all that peeved him. “They made me wash dishes and clothes, which made me angry. I wasn’t used to that.”

He somehow convinced the shelter operators to let him go, pledging not to beg again. But he was soon back in business. The authorities found him begging and took him back to the shelter. And once again, he escaped.

Living on a prayer

Till date, the KMC has rescued more than 370 homeless. Of them, 145 have been handed over to their families, nine are being treated at hospitals, and the rest have been sent to different shelters run by the Ashram.

First, the homeless are brought to the Ashram’s screening shelter in Balaju, Kathmandu, where they are given counselling and motiva­tional classes. A medical check-up is then done. The authorities then try to trace their family members and convince the homeless to go back to their homes.

“Our first attempt is to rehabilitate the homeless into their families,” says KMC Spokesperson Ishwor Man Dangol. “But if that doesn’t work, we send them to a shelter home.”

“At the Ashram, we engage them in different tasks such as cleaning, cooking, weaving doko. We also pro­vide the facility of physiotherapy for the elderly,” says the Ashram’s Ramji Adhikari. “For the devout, we also organize Bhajan Kritan (religious chanting) in the evenings.”

Adhikari says the campaign will continue so long as there are home­less people on the streets. “We are even planning to find jobs for those who are physically and mentally fit,” he adds enthusiastically.

The KMC provides for the food, clothes, and medicine to home­less at the Ashram shelters. It’s a different story altogether that ben­eficiaries like Thapa think staying homeless is better as it saves them from being answerable to anybody.

Sital Chaulagain, 37, from some­where in the erstwhile Koshi zone, has spent eight years in the street begging along with her three children and three grandchildren. She was abandoned by her husband before she took to the streets. Chaulagain too was taken to an Ashram along with her family. But a regulated life there made her uncomfortable.

“They made me to do a lot of work, from washing dishes to cleaning the floors,” says Chaulagain. “It made me sick. They didn’t give me proper medicines also. I was afraid if the same would happen to my children.”

She made a few pledges and left the place. As she had nothing to feed her children with, she got back to begging. These days Chaulagain runs away whenever she sees an official approaching. “Now we never want to go there [shelter home] again.”

Creatures of habit

Such is also the case with 40-year-old Kumar Subba from Illam, who has been begging for a ‘very long time’. He lost his parents when he was still a child. They also used to live in the streets. Subba too has been taken to the Ashram twice. “I escaped both times as I didn’t like the food there,” says Subba. “They gave clean beds and room. But the food they provided was disgusting.”

As the campaign is new for Nepal, authorities say they are yet to devise ways to keep the homeless from going back to the streets. And despite their best efforts there are plenty of homeless beggars to be found on the streets of Kathmandu. Perhaps the shelters they are kept in are not up to the standard.

But this phenomenon of many of the homeless people being uncom­fortable in designed shelters is also global phenomenon—and one not easy to tackle. When the National Public Radio in the US wanted to know why some people chose street over a shelter, David Pirtle of the National Coalition for the Home­less, replied: “All I can say is that my fear of the unknown, of what might be waiting for me at that shel­ter, was worse than my fear of the known risk, you know, of staying out on the street. That was where I was comfortable. And I think peo­ple, we’re creatures of habit. We get comfortable in the most uncom­fortable positions, and that just becomes home.”

Adhikari of the Ashram concurs: “After keeping them with us for a while, we hand them to their fam­ilies, if they have one. But they are not used to the comforts of home. So they pick a fight and go back to the streets. This, says Adhikari, is “the biggest challenge we face” O

Nepali student unions are long used to shutting down education institutions. Now even teachers and staffers seem to be getting into it, as is evidenced at Kathmandu University in Dhulikhel, which had thus far been spared of such disruptive shutdowns.

KU professors and staffers have shut down classes of different faculties and departments, demanding recognition of their organizations—Kathmandu University Professor Association (KUPA), and Kathmandu University Staff Association (KUSA)—from the university. They have even been padlocking department and dean offices for the past three weeks.
The university, established in 1991, had long been untouched by party politics before it gave in to the demand for the opening of student unions affiliated to different political parties. Among the sufferers are foreign students, who constitute 20 percent of the total university students.
Maisha Spriha of Bangladesh is a student of pharmacy. She expresses her frustration with the shutdown: “It’s hard on us students. To be honest, it’s hard on the teachers as well. If this shutdown brings positive changes in the university, then we are fine with it. But we can’t say if that’ll be the case.”
The associations claim the shutdown is aimed at safeguarding the interests of not only teachers and staffers, but also of the students. They are demanding that the university ‘honor’ past agreements of recognizing the associations.
“On August 30 last year, KU’s executive council agreed to grant recognition to both the organizations. It also agreed to address our three demands—allowing KUPA’s president to take part in the university’s executive council meeting, ensuring transparency in administrative works of the university, and building mechanism to guarantee career growth of teachers and employees at the varsity,” says Bed Mani Dahal, president of KUPA.
He lambasts the executive council for not addressing those demands.
Deepak Dahal, a manager at the university, says students are suffering due to the teachers strike. “It is difficult to immediately fulfill their demands. They can only be addressed via the university senate in the presence of the prime minister and education minister,” says Dahal.
Meanwhile, students are mostly expressing their frustrations through social media.
“The university administration is sleeping like a log, and the professors and employees have resorted to protests. Students are suffering,” writes Kokish Busal, a student of mechanical engineering, on Facebook. Likewise, Kiran Gyawali, a law student, writes: “Maybe we run a public hearing with the vice chancellor, registrar, KUPA/KUSA members, and students to find a way out. How long should it go like this? There are rumors that classes will not reopen until January 27.”
“The concerned authorities should resolve it as soon as possible and keep us students out of it. They may choose to close the administration, but why cancel classes?” asks Spriha.
Bigen Aryal, a computer science student at the university, says he does not know who is right and who is wrong. “We only know that the conflict between the management and teachers is troubling all the students,” he says.

Leela Devkota, 38, was returning to her home near Budhanilkantha Temple at around 10:00 on the morning of 14 December 2019. As she was walking on the sidewalk, a grey Suzuki car breached the sidewalk, and ran over her. She was later pronounced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital.
Police investigation showed 21-year-old Prithiva Malla was driving the car—under the influence. In fact, he was completely drunk. The car was full of beer bottles and, reportedly, even illegal drugs. He had three other friends in the car.

The killing of a working mother of three by an inebriated driver created much uproar. The fact that the incident occurred during unusual hours for drunk driving came as a surprise for many. It later turned out that Malla had been out on a drinking spree with his friends for the whole night before the accident.
Nepal Police’s alcohol detection test for drunk drivers, popularly known as Mapase, has been credited for controlling alcohol-induced accidents in the Kathmandu Valley. But the case of Malla throws a different light on this issue.
The record of Metropolitan Traffic Police Department Kathmandu shows reduction in the rate of alcohol-induced accidents until four years ago. But the trend has been reversing in the past three years.
In FY 2016/17, there were 167 drunk-driving accidents, killing seven. The number of accidents rose to 221 in 2017/18 with 11 deaths, and to 283 with 16 deaths in 2018/19. In the first five months of 2019/20, already 237 accidents have been recorded, with four deaths.
Does it indicate waning effectiveness of Nepal Police’s alcohol detection test? Or does it show the alcoholics have found a way out—driving when there is no Mapase test? It is hard to say.
“Improvement is needed in the way traffic police work. Each officer on the street should have at least a breathalyzer to detect alcohol,” says Govinda Bhattarai, road activist and senior advisor at Nepal Automobile Association (NASA), an organization that works for road safety. “There is also no machine to trace other drugs.”
For somebody caught driving under the influence, the punishment is Rs 1,000 in fine, an hour-long road safety class at the traffic police, and a hole punched in the driving license. Five such holes will lead to the license’s suspension. Altogether 444 licenses have been suspended in eight years of the Mapase control campaign.
“The punishment for drunk driving is inadequate,” Bhattarai adds. “And the alcohol test is done only during the evening hours. The alcoholics know when and how to avoid the Mapase tests.”
The traffic police say they have challenges of their own.
“There are several reasons why we have not been able to trace drunk drivers,” said traffic police spokesperson and Superintendent of Police Jeevan Kumar Shrestha. “First, we don’t have enough manpower. Second, it is difficult for us to inspect during the day due to rush hours. Likewise, they might also be using alternate roads where our officers are not on duty.”
Shrestha is aware that there may be plenty of people who drink and drive during daytime.
Nearly every month, a couple of cases of alcohol-related accidents in the daytime are reported, says Jitesh Dahal, an inspector at traffic police. Yet there is no systemic record of the total number of road accidents in the daytime, much less due to alcohol.
“We are doing our job. But the drivers and their families also need to be aware of their roles,” says SP Shrestha. “These days, parents are often uncaring if their children come home drunk. Discipline starts at home. I ask parents to check what their children are doing.”