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We must understand the reasons Nepal could, for ages, maintain a relatively stable economy, be free from colonization or occupation by foreign invaders, and provide home to one of the happiest people on earth. Throughout history, we Nepali have been strongly driven by the concepts of karma and afterlife (though both seem less of a priority today). Survival assured, people are willing to live on half of what they deserve. We are afraid of a poor public image, readily embrace austerity and try to save fortunes for the future. We are highly driven by cultural values.

Nepali are nature worshipers. We worship almost all things in nature: living and nonliving, terrestrial and heavenly, visible and invisible, plants, animals and humans, soil, water, air, fire and space, relatives and strangers. We consider anything that disturbs nature as problems: climate change, global warming, biodiversity loss, pollution of soil, water and air, radiation hazards, ozone layer depletion, and nuclear threat. In the face of terrorism and ongoing regional and global conflicts, not surprisingly Nepal had proposed itself a Zone of Peace!

Nepal needs both economic and infrastructure build-up to start from inside, from grassroots. Large-scale and high-sounding projects are not our priority. We do not want to inundate our millennia-old river-bank settlements to erect reservoirs for hydroelectricity plants. Instead, an average Nepali would prefer covering barren mountains with solar plates or wind fans.

The major part of Nepali agriculture is still organic. Ironically, we advocate productivity at any cost and teach farmers to use chemical fertilizers, pesticides, green houses, as well as exotic, hybrid and genetically modified (GM) and suicide seeds. Each of these steps makes the locals lose their independence and resilience to adversity. They inflict devastating harms on the locals, their livelihood, ecosystem and traditional wisdom. Overuse and inappropriate application of chemical fertilizers has upset soil composition and degraded its productivity.

Pesticides have not only indiscriminately killed insects, weeds, fungi, pests and other useful natural enemies of the harmful ones, they also have become serious threats to human health. They are now associated with various types of cancers, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, organ failure and even sudden death. Seemingly attractive greenhouses have further damaged the environment. Imprudent adoption of exotic, hybrid and GM seeds has threatened our seed banks.

Throughout history, attached toilets were not our dream. Excreta was not tolerated in homes, or nearby water bodies or sacred places. However, the waste was commonly used as organic manure in the fields. After natural organic decomposition, the excreta mix and disappear into fertile soil. This fact was well understood by our ancestors. Human feces and urine formed a part of the healthy ecosystem. People benefitted from active toilet habits. Now we are encouraged to build modern, attached toilets, wasting our already scarce resources. The result is sedentary population, conflicts over dumping sites, as well as various other health and environmental hazards associated with improper waste disposal.

Rapid population growth has put extra pressure on arable land, housing, forest, open space, water and other natural resources. Population planning and maintenance of demographic balance should be a priority. However, our slogan ‘small family, happy family’ has been misinterpreted by many as ‘no to joint family’! The result is adults splitting up from their aging parents and aged grandparents, thus leaving the elderly at the mercy of the state and elderly-care centers.

Some people pay no heed to elderly in their families and localities but found or fund elderly care organizations elsewhere for publicity. Society needs to begin ridiculing such figures.

Our newly adopted education system that promotes materialist views oblivious of the spiritual, religious and moral aspects of development is no less responsible for social disintegration. Now each adult speaks of ‘I’ as ‘a free person’ with rights to choose a life ‘as I like’. With such stubborn views and attitudes, ‘we educated people’ have become feeling-less mechanistic living units, without any concern for the larger society. This has to change.

The biggest reason for our economic poverty is wrong land use. Nepal needs to learn from its own experience. Holding land as a fortune has many downsides. I do not propose snatching private land. But I do propose banning trade of land. Let us own no more land than what we can cultivate without hiring laborers or using mass production tools. Let us not own land or houses for rentals. Let us ensure skyscrapers are not blocking sunlight, or posing threat to bordering lands, houses or waters in case of fires or earthquakes. Such structures harm people both physically and mentally.

Let us begin anew. Let agricultural and settlement lands be fixed first. Let all rivers, streams and lakes and selected forests be declared sovereign—no government, no community, no person can remove them, destroy them, pollute them, cover them, or harm them. This will ensure clean air and environment. For industrial or other activities needing larger pieces of land, let the state or community rent land, hills, rivers, lakes or forests.

Let us fix land prices. Let the state buy all the land being sold, and sell it at the same price to those who need it, on a priority basis fixed by the local community. To the squatters, provide it for free but make it non-transferable and non-sellable, which the state can give to other people if the former tenants are no longer poor or cease to use land as required by the contract.

We also have other development needs. The above-mentioned steps will not only make our land more inhabitable and ensure better and healthy food supply. They will also save our precious resources and enable us work on other priority projects.

The author is a professor of pharmacy at Tribhuvan University

Being landlocked between two large countries, Nepal’s international trade has been basically limited to China and India. With the end of the Rana regime and opening up to the world, Nepal’s trade diversification began in 1951. In his seminal article “Nepal’s Recent Trade Policy” published in Asian Survey in 1964, YP Pant describes how Nepal’s favorable trade with India before 1951 had turned to a deficit. Nepal’s trade volume with Pakistan (including the present-day Bangladesh) accounted for less than three percent of the total. Pant also mentioned that Nepal’s trade with Tibet was negligible.

With the construction of the Kathmandu-Lhasa Highway and other land routes, China became our second largest trade partner, today covering 14 percent of total foreign trade. India remains our major trade partner, making for 64 percent of total trade. Nepal has active transit treaties with India, Bangladesh and China. Again, our trade is basically limited to India and China.

What is bothersome is Nepal’s trade deficit, which hit $11.69bn in 2020-21. Nepal exports to India a tenth of what it imports from there. With China, while Nepal’s import was $1.95 billion in 2020-21, our export was a negligible $8.35 million. In the first six months of the current fiscal, the balance of payment (BoP) was at a loss of $2bn. Such huge trade deficits and negative BoP can herald an economic failure. Immediate attention is called for.

Compensating such huge deficits with tourism, which brought Nepal total revenue of $668 million in 2019, is unrealistic. Remittance too is declining. The demography of Nepali workers overseas is changing, with an increase in the number of skilled workers who are going to more advanced countries and regions, and choosing to settle there. They are less likely to send remittances to Nepal where they do not intend to live. Nepal is thus yet to find an effective way to balance its trade.

Failing regionalism

Multilateral trade forums, including the WTO, have emerged as a solution to trade barriers, promising coordinated trade negotiations that enable smaller economies to get fair terms. Regional negotiations also help member countries avoid double standards in dealing with different neighbors of similar cooperation potentials.

Simplification of multilateral cooperation definitely facilitates trades. Unfortunately, not all member countries and regions can make equal gains. Multilateral cooperation helps those who prove competitive in global trade, and hinders the relatively weak and disadvantaged.

What Nepal needs is to identify geographical and economic regions, membership in which gives it an opportunity to carry business more fairly. At present there is little scope of regional trade cooperation with the north as it is difficult for cargos to get past the vast, neighboring China. South Asia is where Nepal belongs, which is also why it helped establish the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA)—with Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as its signatories.

Nepal also joined the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) in 2004 whose priority areas include trade and investment, and tourism. Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand are members of the BIMSTEC Free Trade Area. However, our economic and trade cooperation has been basically limited to India.

Not that there is no possibility of meaningful cooperation within SAFTA or BIMSTEC. With Indian help, there are already signs of trade in products and services like electricity, agricultural products, information technology, medicine, tourism and education. However, compared to India and China, trade volumes with other countries are small, and any trade surplus with them is unlikely to offset the deficits with India and China.

Go bilateral

Nepal’s efforts at Nepal-China-India trilateral cooperation have not been successful. China and India share a long land border, and are also connected with seas. The Chinese land connected to Nepal is sparsely populated, and has limited scope for trade other than in minerals, and Indian pilgrimage to Mount Kailash and Mansarovar. Connectivity alone will not bring Nepal substantial economic gains. Further, long-term rivalry between China and India is not conducive to trilateral cooperation.

India, which maintains a porous, open border with Nepal, frequently sets conditions to imports from Nepal. India says its favorable terms of term only extend to goods and services originating in Nepal, and exclude the goods and services where foreign raw material or investment is involved.

Nepal is a minor trade partner for both China and India. But, for us, they are major ones. Here, economic and trade diplomacy could be useful. First, we should classify our trade items into essential and non-essential. We should then allow import of non-essential commodities, provided such imports do not lead to bilateral trade imbalance. Second, we should request China and India to invest in Nepal in sectors that contribute to import substitution, and promote our export to the investing country or to other markets outside our reserved quota.

Third, we should listen to their suggestions on bilateral trade balance, and try to accommodate them so long as such measures do not negatively affect Nepali economy, jobs, social harmony, culture, values, politics and international relations.

Sure, some items we import from our neighbors are refined third-country raw materials, or are in short supply here. Such items can be considered essential, and thus should be excluded in the evaluation of bilateral trade balance. These items as well as security-related and life-saving goods and services and new essential technologies can be covered through donations, remittance and international cooperation.

With right decisions and modest austerity, we can become self-sufficient in food and basic services. Outside these, Nepal should adopt a policy of balanced bilateral trade.

The author is a professor of pharmacy at Tribhuvan University

Sooner or later Nepal has to come to a working relationship with the Taliban-led Afghanistan. There are more factors linking these two countries than those dividing them. Both are landlocked. Both are members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the UN, and the IMF. Both have joined the China-led Belt and Road Initiatives, and are observer members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Both nations are trying to come out of messy conflicts, discard the ‘least developed’ label and achieve ‘developing’ status.

Politically, Nepal has embraced a socialism-oriented, secular multiparty democracy. As a signatory to a series of human rights treaties, and as a UN member, Nepal is bound to promote universal respect for and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms of all without distinction as to the race, sex, language or religion.

The new Taliban regime of Afghanistan has said the country will be ruled under the Islamic sharia law. Nepal maintains a friendly relation with Afghanistan, and is unlikely to bother with its internal affairs. We should indeed respect the religious, political and economic choices of Afghan people.

In the broader spectrum, Nepal is itself a country sandwiched between two giants with different political and economic systems. It needs to use its limited strength and influence prudently. Protecting national sovereignty, safeguarding interests of Nepali nationals, providing reasonable support to Nepali blood, languages, cultures, identity and history, both inside and outside the current political borders, are our primary duties. Afghan people and big powers among them will solve the issues of human rights, counter-terrorism, and other conflicts associated with values there.

In terms of political maps, sometimes united and sometimes divided, Nepal has remained an independent, sovereign country. Even if outsiders have settled in Nepal and ruled it, they have ultimately been assimilated to the Nepali soil, their off-springs becoming dhartiputra or the children of the land. A key to our success was articulated by our founding father Prithvi Narayan Shah who suggested Nepal maintain good relations with China and India.

The land of present-day Afghanistan has been invaded and ruled by different forces in history. It was conquered by Darius I of Babylonia circa 500 BC, Alexander the Great of Macedonia in 329 BC, Mahmud of Ghazni in the 11th century, and Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Even after Afghanistan was created as a nation in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani, through a series of wars in the 19th century, it was forced to cede much of its territory and autonomy to Britain. Afghanistan gained full independence from British influence only in 1919.

Following the British withdrawal from India in 1947, Afghanistan had to handle a largely uncontrollable border with the newly-formed Pakistan. Afghanistan and the Soviet Union became close allies in 1956, followed by Afghan reforms the next year, allowing women to attend university and join the workforce.

Conflicts and internal fights led to the 1979 Soviet invasion and the 1989 withdrawal; the 2001 US invasion and the 2021 withdrawal. Located at the strategic crossroads of Central Asia, South Asia and West Asia, Afghanistan has been a battleground of different political, religious, cultural and economic powers throughout history. So far all attempts to occupy Afghanistan have ultimately failed.

The effects of the American counter-terrorism campaign since 9/11 have not been uniform. In countries such as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar where the US did not seek regime change, the US efforts have been a success. In countries such as Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq where the US focused on regime changes, the US efforts have failed to contain.

The terrorists have succeeded in identifying themselves as the forces fighting the US and other anti-Islam countries and forces, and thus winning Muslim sympathy worldwide. Besides, the hidden American geopolitical interests helped blur the differences between moderate Muslims and hardliners, many a time tagging moderates as hardliners, which ultimately led to the spread of terrorism.

Also read: China-South Asia cooperation: Sky’s the limit

Americans first tried to use the Islam element to counter the Soviets. After the downfall of the Soviet Union, this trained militia turned on the US, their former mentors. As such, it is not a confrontation between two civilizations; it is not a West-versus-Muslims clash. It is a confrontation between two interest groups to dominate the world, the resources. The US being the stronger one adopted the role of the ‘world police’. The Muslim outfits being the weaker side tried to present themselves as ‘Muslim fighters’ to challenge the US, in the form of modern guerrilla attacks.

Following the US withdrawal, the world is divided on tackling Afghanistan. The US and its allies have refused to formally recognize the Taliban-led government. But China, Russia, Pakistan and some others have maintained relations with the new regime, some hoping the Taliban will help counter cross-border terrorism, contain radical Islamist ISIS group and respect the rights of women and minorities.

What should Nepal do?

Nepali people and media seem divided on the Afghan issue. Some have expressed worries that extremists have come to power; others are happy that the US occupation has ended. This scribe would rather recommend a careful, weighted response.

Nepal has an open border with India. Unlike China and the US, we are unable to control the border effectively. Not far back, Rohingya refugees from Burma, some Afghan refugees, and even Congolese refugees, have successfully made their way to Kathmandu. So tightening of the land border, especially in cooperation with India, should be our top priority. Similarly, we should beef up scrutiny against suspicious international arrivals by air.

As to maintaining our relation with the Afghan regime, we should raise issues of our interest. It was the Taliban that demolished the two monumental fifth century Buddha statues in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley in 2001. The fanatics did not pay any heed to the worldwide condemnation of their cultural crime. Buddha is a part of our history, our identity and Nepal is the mother of Hinduism, Buddhism and related language and culture. We should talk about these issues openly. Our foreign policy should reflect our interests in a broader sense.

We as a society barely ask a basic question, what are schools and books for? To help students adjust in the competitive and dynamic society? Or, to model them into our social frame? Perhaps, for both. For simplicity, let us not indulge in defining different but related jargons—education, teaching/learning, literacy, curricula, aims, objectives, outcomes, achievements, ethics and the like.

Schools are considered essential. State, society and parents invest in them, trust them with training young minds. The governments designate ministries, bureaus, councils or departments to take care of the schools (‘school’ here includes all levels and categories of institutions providing education or training). These designated governmental bodies, schools and communities develop and implement the modalities, contents and other details. Students are rarely involved in decision-making; most parents are considered unknowledgeable and required to oblige to what the system offers. Both the parents and children are helpless when the system does not allow the student’s promotion to next grade for his failure to achieve minimum competency in a language that is not his own!

Besides what the students are being taught and how they are being helped, the weight the students have to carry in the form of books, stationery and other supplies is alarming. A grade seven Nepali student weighing 29 kg carries an average burden of 6.5 kg as a schoolbag, 8.5 kg if the melodica is included. Even kindergarteners have to carry bags! While the majority of kids in urban areas either have access to school bus or are helped by guardians, those in remote countryside have to carry the load themselves, walking up and down the hills and sometimes crossing rivers on the way.

Also read: Systemic dysfunction

The detrimental effects of disproportionate bag weights are clear. A 1994 Scandinavian Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine article based on studies in 1,178 school children in France discussed musculoskeletal problems (lumber, thoracic and leg pains) associated with backpack use, which has become an increasing concern with school children. A 2005 Applied Ergonomics article found as many as 77 percent of secondary school students in New Zealand experienced musculoskeletal symptoms, including upper and lower back pains, due to their heavy school bags.

Indian students suffered no less. As Awantika and Shalini Agrawal report in International Journal of Research (2015), most of the 10-13 year-old students in Lucknow, India, felt pain from carrying a bag comparable to pain from physiological stress.

The 2006 Children School Bags (Limitation on Weight) Bill passed by the Indian Rajya Sabha asked the government to ensure that there would be no school bag for a child studying in nursery and Kindergarten. For children in other grades, the weight of the school bag should be no more than 10 percent of body weight. The law, never implemented, would have made the schools violating the rules liable for a fine of up to three lakh Indian rupees.

As pressure builds, regulations and policies limiting the weight of school bags are finding space in India, which also addressed this issue in its National Educational Policy, 2020. It suggests the weight of a school bag for students between grades 1-10 should be no more than 10 percent of their body weight. Now onwards, Indian schools are required to keep a digital weighing machine inside school premises and monitor the weight of school bags on a regular basis.

What makes the bag heavy?

First, ignorance and a misguided mentality. Schools, the sources of ‘light’ are full of ignorance. They act as if the volume of books their students carry reflect the education, skills, discipline, wisdom and creativity they impart; it is comparable to their majestic-looking, fearful, English, ‘suit and tie’ culture aimed at mercilessly collecting high education fees from poor parents who make the payments hoping their kids will escape the hardships they were forced to bear. Misguidedly, parents and kids do not complain against the bulging of the school bags.

Second, profit motives. The indirect, mean, greedy intentions of those promoting the sales of such books become visible if the whole of business is seen in detail. Consumerism is encouraged; no, it is injected, in the book market. Even if the curriculum remains the same, the publishers revise the textbooks, although they know such revisions are cosmetic, just to ensure the students cannot use old books. They want to add both the number and volume of books.

Also read: Fond memories of my grandfather and Dashains past

Third, the bookworm culture. For centuries, learning and memorization of vocabulary, mathematics, classical grammar, facts and figures formed the bulk of school education. It was the best way to educate students in a mostly illiterate society. Now that most of our population has become literate, the bookworm culture should be replaced with a system more conducive to the building of a harmonious society, one which sows creativity in pupils and prepares them to cope with an unseen future.

Recently introduced computers and internet should not (and have not) replaced printed books, but unfortunately, these have added to the burden in the sense that the pupils are asked to prepare and print so called ‘project reports’ and ‘powerpoint presentations’ on this and that topic, which the kids prepare with the help of the Wikipedia and guardians.

Fourth, unnecessary homework. Schools and parents don’t realize that children need free time, time for physical activities and entertainment, and time to communicate with family members and friends. Students in lower grades should not be given homework at all; for them, learning should be a game, a pleasure. Students in higher grades can be given limited assignments, just enough to encourage their independent learning, no more.

Fifth, lack of lockable drawers for students. Letting students leave their heavy books in the classroom would help reduce their burden. Schools should provide such facilities.

The author is a professor of pharmacy at Tribhuvan University

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 is a historical milestone. Anyone who has read the opening sentence of this document’s Article 1 that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’, in any version of over 500 languages it is published in, considers all human beings equal.

As if the opening statement were not enough, among other explanations, Article 25 states, ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.’

The declaration covers rights to freedom of opinion and expression, religion, marriage (which also implies reproduction), possession of property, governing by equal and universal suffrage, equal pay for equal work, parental prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children. Do all these not make people equal? No.

These declarations and provisions are in paper. In practice, things are different.

The world treats people differently based on sex and it starts as soon as the gender of the fetus can be identified. Synthesizing birth data from 1970 to 2017, from 202 countries and regions, and using a modelling method to fill gaps in countries with poor statistics, Fengqing Chao of the National University of Singapore and her colleagues report—in the 2019 April 15 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—excess male births in some years in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), Georgia, India, South Korea, Montenegro, Tunisia and Vietnam. The reasons were valuing sons over daughters and thus selectively aborting female fetuses. As a result, at least 23 million girls went missing before birth.

In a 2020 statement, UNICEF acknowledges almost one-third of countries have not reached gender parity (defined as having a GPI value between 0.97 and 1.03) in primary education enrolment. In Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, girls are more likely to be disadvantaged than boys. In Chad and Pakistan, for example, the GPI value is 0.78 and 0.84 respectively, meaning that 78 girls in Chad and 84 girls in Pakistan are enrolled in primary school for every 100 boys. The situation is no better in higher education.

Gender imparity in income is also reflected in the Global Gender Gap Index 2020: the global average income of a woman is about $11,000 (in Purchasing Power Parity) while that of a man is $21,000. Citing OECD data from 2010-2019, the World Economic Forum says the differential in men’s median income and women’s median income is about 13.5 percent. The gap is wider in non-OECD countries.

Grant Thornton’s Women in Business 2020 report shows that the proportion of women in senior management roles globally reached the highest of 29 percent in 2019. It is not that women’s share in managerial leadership is any better in developed countries. The same report shows the percentage of women in senior management was 38 in Africa, 35 in East Europe, 33 in Latin America, 30 in the European Union, 29 in North America, and 27 in the Asia Pacific.

Life expectancies are different for babies born in different places. It is 85 years for one born in Japan, 70 years in Nepal, and 52 years in Afghanistan. It is not that all babies in a country or a region are born equal either. Take Fresno city in California, for example. In a southwest ZIP code of Fresno, life expectancy is 69 years. Six miles away, in a northern ZIP code of Fresno, life expectancy is 90 years.

Status of one’s language makes a significant impact on the economic performance of the speaker. In 2011, Tarun Jain of Indian School of Business—using the 1956 reorganization of Indian states on linguistic lines as a natural experiment to estimate the impact of speaking the majority language on educational and occupational outcomes— concluded that districts that spoke the majority language of the state during colonial times enjoy persistent economic benefits, as evidenced by higher educational achievement and employment in communication-intensive sectors. Such a scenario is self-evident when one applies for jobs in international institutions, national bodies or other attractive areas, which eventually leads to income gaps.

Race matters, too. A 2016 UN Report on the World Social Situation shows, in a majority of countries where data were available, the share of ethnic and racial minority workers in skilled—managerial, professional and technical—occupations is lower than that of workers in the majority or dominant ethnic group. Similarly, people living in rural, remote areas characterized by poor infrastructure and little access to off-farm work had poor job opportunities.

In countries like Nepal many elementary school-level brilliant students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds are lost on the way to higher education while poorly performing ones from well-off families are able to get higher education and take leadership positions in politics, influential institutions and business firms. More often than not, the ones from affluent and influential families and society find it easier to get established as celebrities.

Media report in positive light minute details of those born with silver spoons in their mouth. The poor are also reported, but it is done just to make the news sellable. Multinational companies make every penny of their profit by overcharging poor consumers and try to create an altruistic and philanthropic image by selectively supporting some advertizable persons and projects here and there with a fraction of their profits.

In short, there has been much talk about creation of an equitable society but implementation is weak. At present nowhere on earth are people born equal and treated equally. Better drop the insincere slogan of equality and practice an honest principle of doing no harm to fellow humans.

The author is a professor of pharmacy at Tribhuvan University

As the monsoon approaches, Kathmanduites are terrified of rains and subsequent swellings of rivers and streams, often resulting in inundation of roads, fields and homes. At first sight, we blame global warming and climate change. But deeper inspection reveals a different cause-and-effect relationship.

Let us first see how we have treated our surroundings. Recent population growth, urbanization and hike in the land prices have resulted in the occupying and capturing of river banks, the guthi lands meant to support religious, cultural and social activities. The open space is being encroached upon by nearby settlements, skyscrapers, squatters or even government agencies.

We don’t respect history. Set aside are the altruistic wishes of the donors that such land be used for a defined public benefit—as in the case of Sohrakhutte Pati, the traditional hut and adjoining stone spout built in Bikram Era 1862 and 1864 respectively by Bhottu Pandey for the benefit of remote travelers visiting ‘Nepal’, the Kathmandu Valley. In the name of development, the land and structure have been sacrificed to build roads and god knows what else. The founder is long gone, the creation cannot argue for itself, and bystanders are free to decide the fate of something they do not own. Some locals sought the intervention of the Department of Archeology, requesting the application of the ‘Ancient Monument Preservation Act 1956’ and to stop the Pati’s demolition—in vain. Likewise, the 2,000-year-old open space Tundikhel Square is getting fragmented, partly concreted and ‘closed’ to commoners. Even the Pashupatinath Temple has experienced encroachment, physically and culturally.

Ponds, spouts and streams

Once, Kathmandu Valley was a fertile land, covered with greenery that would wear a white frost in winter dawns, slowly giving rise to a transient thick fog, which would disappear under golden sunrays, resulting in a cool clear day. Man lived in harmony with nature. Until half a century ago, the man-water interactions were mainly friendly; they respected each other.

Water was considered a source of life. Wells, ponds and streams were sacred, had to be kept clean, therein lived naagas protecting bodies of water. Defecation and urination near a water source was prohibited. No one would think of discarding waste near standing or flowing water. Settlements had to maintain some distance from the waters, and such provisions were enforced with the popular saying that a stream changes course every 12 years. Safety from streams was sought by keeping ample distance and planting reeds on the banks. But slowly man began to conquer nature. Traditional outlooks became myths, superstitions and even contemptible.

Settlements continued to expand. Combined with population growth, two inventions fuelled the valley’s water crisis. The invention of cement and subsequent culture of covering courtyards with a waterproof layer gave rain water less opportunity to moisten the soil, fill the aquifer. The drilling of deep boreholes and installation of pumping machines began to suck a large amount of groundwater. Now, the water table is sinking, leaving some spaces void that can collapse any time and sink the city above. This is also a reason for drying out of many traditional springs.

If the above-mentioned problems are a byproduct of our endeavor to create clean and easy life, the following ones are different. We began to harness the streams and rivers with concrete embankments, sometimes snatching significant chunks of traditional territory of the rivers. The big boulders in the banks were split and taken away, pebbles and sand rampantly removed, such activities sometimes being auctioned by government bodies. Inspecting the banks that have grown green in the many years since the last flood, we began to think the river would not swell again. Had we utilized the banks for tree-plantation and agriculture, no problem of scale would emerge. Instead, we began to reclaim the land for construction of homes, hospitals and other structures. It is seen in the sweeping away during early monsoon this year by Melamchi River, a source of Kathmandu Valley drinking water project, of police stations, project camps, and government buildings.

Our greed for land has gone to such an extent that some rivulets are simply confined inside large-sized reinforced concrete hume pipes, covered with soil and roads built on top, houses on the previous banks. Others are not covered completely, but harnessed in a way that the stream gets just a few feet of passage and are prevented from flowing sideways by a few meters tall concrete or gabion walls. Nobody tends to their unhappy-but-serene voices in ordinary years, but some day in decades they rage. It pours over the nearby hills and in the city, water forms a flash flood as soon as the first drops of the rain hit the ground. The hume pipes and Corinth Canal-like passage cannot fulfill the conventional duty the unharnessed Manamati, Hanumante, Tukucha and other rivers were carrying out. Clogging of hume pipes or falling of walls over narrow streams are just excuses to conceal severe underlying causes. Engineering failures are second to wisdom failures.

The above-mentioned are not the only sort of problems. Rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, public spaces including squares, temples, roadsides and footpaths have become dumping sites. Sewage is drained in ailing streams and rivers. Polluted air, dusty roads and deformed water bodies now characterize the Valley. The hope the Valley could again be inhabitable was regained only during the Covid-19 lockdowns. No surprise that recently ‘Green Kathmandu, Clean Kathmandu’ has become a sellable election slogan.

Climate change, then?

Yes, global warming and climate change do impact us. But in the case of Kathmandu, they are scapegoats. Whenever some agitating group imposes a general strike banning vehicular movements and industrial operations, the air clears the next morning. This means, basically, our local activities and attitudes determine our environment.  

It is pleasing to note that Nepal is a carbon negative country. However, it does not mean that Kathmanduites have access to fresh air. Not only do man and plants exchange air. All living beings, rocks and rivers, industries and vehicles, walls and buildings breathe. It is only the manmade, the artificial, that pollutes the air. All others, though some of them may seem to pollute the air at first sight, ultimately contribute to its cleaning.

We are paying attention to global warming and cooperating with the international community in minimizing the impact of climate change. This is good. But there are also things we can do on our own to quickly produce sustainable benefits. This involves looking to our own roots, firmly holding our environment-friendly philosophy in dealing with nature, realizing that man is trusted with unparalleled power not only for his selfish needs. We have committed many blunders. We need to correct ourselves.

Let us begin by allowing water to become clean again. Let our interactions with water be friendly. Once we respect the ponds and streams, they will reciprocate. Let the water cycle be restored. Let streams breathe.

The author is professor of pharmacy, Tribhuvan University