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Many people across the country dream of owning a house and settling in Kathmandu Valley. But Tari Bahadur Prajapati is different. He made a bold choice by selling his ancestral property, including his land and house in Thimi, Bhaktapur, and relocating to Gorkha 28 years ago. 

Prajapati rented a piece of land at Chorkate village in Siranchowk Rural Municipality-4, Gorkha, built a pottery workshop, and started crafting clay products. Chorkate has long been inhabited by the Kumal community, with a rich heritage in the art of pottery. Over the past three decades, Prajapti has gained recognition in the village as the ‘Newari Kumal’.

The Kumal community primarily practiced pottery in areas such as Kundurtar and Adhaigaun in Gorkha. Initially, Prajpati encountered challenges in competing with the local potters. However, owing to the high demand for clay products during that period, he swiftly established his business foothold.

Very soon plastic, rubber, aluminum and iron products started inundating the market, placing the traditional potters, who had honed their craft over centuries, in a precarious position, and Prajapati was no exception. While many Kumal artisans reluctantly abandoned their ancestral profession, Prajapati remained resolute. Today, he remains the sole practitioner of his craft, not just in his village but the entire Gorkha district.

At the age of 65, Prajapati finds no interest in pursuing alternate professions. “I have a dedicated customer base, and this business adequately sustains my livelihood. Why should I shift to another profession?” says Prajapati. His two sons, however, have embraced different paths, one is a metal worker and other an electrician. 

Prajapati’s clay products reach different markets across Gorkha. Some of his popular products include clay lamps, pots, vases, and piggy banks. Notably, the demand for clay pots for roasting corn and earthen vessels, cherished for their cooling properties, has been on the rise.

Prajapati hasn’t faced any problem in sourcing clay for his craft as there are no other people involved in the profession. He brings clay from a quarry in Ludikhola once a year. Prajpati has replaced the manual pottery wheel with a motor-powered wheel. Additionally, he has invested in a clay-mixing machine to streamline his production process.

He believes that the government’s support and cooperation could encourage more people to become involved  in the pottery profession. “Government support could reinvigorate and ensure the continuity of age-old professions like pottery for generations to come,” he says. But so far, this lone potter in Gorkha has not received any help.

Tsering Angmo and her brother Tsering Lama attend a private school in Gorkha Bazaar, the district headquarters of Gorkha. The siblings hail from Nyaku village of Chumanuwri Rural Municipality, and they visit their parents once every year. 

“We visit our parents once every year after the end-term exams are over, spend time with them for 10-15 days, and return for a new academic session,” says Angmo.  She joined the school as a nursery-level student, and is currently a tenth grader. “I haven’t spent much time in my village. Not that I don’t want to, but my parents want me and my brother to get a good education,” she says. 

Angmo and her brother are not the only children in Chumanuwri who are staying away from their families for the sake of education. Nearly all children of school-going age in the rural municipality share the similar fate.  One can hardly see any children in the rural municipality, as most of them have been sent away by their parents so that they can go to school.   

Nima Wangyal of Lahi village has six children. Except for his three-year-old son, all five children are either studying in Kathmandu or in India. 

“Three of my children are in Kathmandu and two others are in India. They are there for their studies because there is no school in our village,” he says. 

Wangyal has to pay for the schooling of his two children in India, while the education of his three children in Kathmandu is being sponsored by foreigners.  

If he didn’t send his children to school, he says, they might end up like him stuck in a remote village raising cattle and not doing much with their lives. 

“Those who got a chance to get an education are doing well.  That’s why I decided to send my children away,” says Wangyal. 

In many cases, children in Chumanuwri have foreign sponsors to fund their education. Wangyal says these sponsors usually come through their Lama (spiritual leader). 

Lhakpo Tsewang says since there are no schools in the rural municipality, most of the children are sent to the city areas for education. 

“The only children you see in villages these days are infants. It has been this way for about 10 years now,” he says. 

This flight of children from their homes was prompted by the absence of schools in Chumanuwri—though the local government records show the rural municipality has 21 schools in operation. 

Until a couple of years ago, Chumanuwri used to have a school, Juung Primary, but it was closed down for reasons unknown to the villagers, says Tsewang.  

“An organization called Hope Alliance had built classrooms for the school. It even ran a free lunch program,” he says. “But after the organization left, the school also closed down. We don’t know what happened.” 

Namgyal Lama of Syo village says there are dozens of settlements and villages in Chumanuwri Rural Municipality where it is hard to find children of school-going age these days. 

“It’s just me and my wife at home. Like most other children, ours too are in the city for education,” he says.

It has been 11 years since China promised the teachers and students of Sinjali Secondary School in Gorkha a well-equipped building. But students are still having to attend classes in temporary shelters as construction is yet to start. 

Chinese officials signed an agreement with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance in 2010/11 stating that a well-equipped building would be constructed for the school in Sahid Lakhan Village Municipality-4. The old school building was ravaged by the 2015 earthquakes. 

During the prime ministership of Baburam Bhattarai, a visiting high-level Chinese delegation had agreed to build 10 residential school buildings in the Himalayan district. According to Sinjali secondary school principal Bal Narayn Shrestha, his school was eighth on the list. 

“In the meantime, the Chinese have visited the school twice, but to no avail,” says Shrestha. 

“All the schools ravaged by the quakes in the district have been rebuilt, but our school is still without a building,” says Shrestha, whose school’s 11-room building was damaged beyond repair. 

Also read: Two ‘new’ ethnic groups register themselves in census 

In the absence of a building, students from grades 1-8 are obliged to attend classes in temporary shelters. Students in grades nine and 10 have been forced to study in the old building marked with a red sticker indicating that the building is unsafe and can collapse any time. 

Shrestha says the school faces a lot of problems during inclement weather. While summer heat is unbearable, dew drops from the roof in winter. During the rainy season, the roof leaks and water seeps into the classroom. In addition, sound from one room can be clearly heard in another. 

He complains of being tired of frequenting the Chinese embassy, ​​the Department of Education and the Ministry of Finance. He says the school management committee, teachers and parents have repeatedly sought the promised support, but in vain.

Chief of the Education Development and Coordination Unit Khemraj Poudel in the district says that it is unclear if construction would start this year as well. “This is an agreement signed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We are also confused when construction will start,” he says. “It is a matter of diplomacy I guess.”

 Poudel says all other schools in the district, which wanted new buildings, now have them. 

Members of two groups living in Gorkha have registered themselves as separate ethnic communities for the first time in the ongoing 12th national census.

Members of the Chumba and Nubri ethic groups, who live in Chum and Nubri valleys of Gorkha use ‘Lama’ as their surname, were listed as members of the Tamang community during the previous census. This time they have enlisted themselves as Chum and Nubri people and the same as their language.

This came after local youth groups campaigned to raise awareness about the issue, said Wanchuk Rapten from Kimolung Foundation. “We organized door-to-door campaigns to ensure that the Chum and Nubri people enlist themselves in the correct way,” he added. “We also used social media and telephone to make the people aware.” He hoped that the latest census will establish their identity as being separate from the Tamang people.

The local residents feel at ease as most of the enumerators enrolled for the census are from the two communities, said Pema Gyalbo Lama, a resident of Nubri. “We understood that people from other regions won’t understand our feelings. That is why members of the same community have been mobilized as enumerators,” he said. “Even if some of the illiterate people find it hard to give their details, the enumerators will assist them to do so,” he added.

Aslo read: Nepal’s decennial census needs a rethink

“The Central Bureau of Statistics hasn’t assigned any particular codes to facilitate the listing of the two communities as separate ethnic groups,” he added. “The district office has told us that they will look into the matter,” he added.

“They are a separate ethnic group. But due to a mistake, they were counted as Tamangs,” said Mahendra Prasad Dhungana, head of the district census committee. “Even if we haven’t assigned separate codes for the two groups, the census office will do the needful,” he added.

Meanwhile, Gurung and Ghale communities of Dharche have listed ‘Bon’ as their religion. In the past, they were listed as followers of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity. “We are Bon people and we want to ensure that we are counted that way,” said campaigner Tek Bahadur Gurung.

The national census, which is held every 10 years, is being conducted from November 11 to 25. As many as 40,000 enumerators and 8,016 superintendents have been assigned for the job.

The Central Bureau of Statistics has built mechanisms from the federal level down to the ward level to conduct the census this year. District census offices have been set up in all 77 districts, with an additional 10 offices in the most populated districts. Similarly, 349 local level census offices have been established at the local level.

When tourism-related activities boomed on the Manaslu trekking route, many people living in the area ventured into the hotel business while existing hotels expanded their capacity. 

But when the entire tourism sector witnessed an unprecedented slump due to the Covid-19 pandemic, entrepreneurs who invested in hotels by taking loans with interest rates as high as 36 percent per annum are now in distress as the hotels have been shut down for the most part of the year in the region. 

Ganesh Karki, a hotelier, complains that he is in a stage where he does not know if he should cry out of despair or laugh out of frustration. “After failing to provide the required services to tourists coming to my place, I decided to take a loan at whatever interest I had to pay to increase the capacity of the hotel,” Karki says. “But last year, there was a fall in tourist numbers due to dengue and this year, Covid has completely ruined business.” 

Karki informs that he took a 160,000 rupee loan with a 36 percent interest rate per annum from a local loan shark. “I have paid Rs 240,000 as interest alone and still, the principle has not been reduced by a single rupee,” Karki says, “My creditor does not stop demanding money even when he can see that my business has not been running at all.”

The creditor demands the interest amount every day and when Karki cannot pay on time, he doubles and then triples the interest, adding to the total due amount. Not only Karki, many other hoteliers in the Manaslu area have also fallen into the trap of compounding ‘meter interest.’ Ram Kumar Gurung, ward chairman of Chumanubri Rural Municipality-3, says that there are many complaints about non-payment of loans at 36 percent interest. 

“Initially, the tourists started coming here in droves and hoteliers ran out of places to keep them. So they took loans at exorbitant interest rates to increase their capacities,” Gurung explains, “Now that the business has been down for months, they have been unable to pay their dues and the creditors come to us with complaints.” The ward office has been mediating between the creditors and debtors by asking the debtors to pay at least the principle first and the accrued interest at a later date. 

Businesses in the area were forced to take personal loans at high-interest rates because the banks refused to invest in the tourism sector, says Karki.  “Had the banks invested in our business, as they do in the cities, we would have been in a better situation,” Karki says. Residents complain that the banks do not even operate properly in the area. Consumer committee members are forced to walk for seven days to get to Gorkha Bazaar, the district headquarters, at the end of the fiscal year because the banks in the rural municipality do not offer complete banking services. 

“Third World War is happening soon and all men aged 18-60 will be forcibly drafted.”

At the time of the 1981-82 census, rumors like these spread through the Syala village and villagers thus lied about their names with the enumerators. The names they gave belonged to local forests, rivers and everything they could see around, anything but their own names.

Then, in 1984, when officials from the Department of Survey came to the village, another rumor spread that the government would seize the land of people holding more land than necessary. 

Thus the villagers got only fractions of their land surveyed. “The villagers missed out on the survey and didn’t get papers for their land, the result of which we are facing now,” says Pembareta Lama, ward chair of Chumanubri Rural Municipality-2.

The women in the area got their citizenship certificates easily but the men, who falsified their names, faced great difficulties in getting theirs. “Large swathes of land were not surveyed. So now we have to live in settlements without land ownership certificates. No matter how much we try, we haven been unable to get the deeds for our property,” Lama adds. 

Residents of 115 households of Syala village, Chumanubri-2, live in settlements without ownership certificates. Hundreds of foreign tourists used to come to this popular tourist destination where big hotels, schools and monasteries have been built. But the local people don’t have land ownership certificates.

Around 131 households in the upper settlement of Samagaun in Chumanubri Rural Municipality-1 also don’t have deeds to prove they own the land. Since the area is a gateway to Manaslu and Larke Pass, most houses here run hotels to cater to the regular flow of both domestic and international tourists. Consequently, millions have been spent on building hotels, lodges and other infrastructures in the area.

Bir Bahadur Lama, ward chair of Chumbanuri-1, informs that none of the owners of houses built over 40 years ago in the rural municipality have such certificates. Residents of another settlement Namrung also don’t have certificates. “Thirty-eight households here do not have lal purja,” informs Lakpadundup Lama, a local.

The government has spent millions of rupees to bring drinking water to each household in these settlements. The government has also invested heavily in schools and health posts. But it has not given land ownership certificates to any of the residents yet. 

Four years ago, the government, under its plans to solve the problems of the squatters and landless people, made the locals sign forms for land ownership certificates. “We have also recently been made to fill another form,” says Lama. “Hopefully, we will now soon get our certificates.”