Submit your Article

Urbanization in Nepal has accelerated in recent years. The number of municipalities increased dramatically from 58 in fiscal year 2013/14 to 293 by 2017/18. Consequently, the population residing in municipalities surged from 17 percent to 66 percent. This sharp rise in urban areas is largely a result of reclassifying rural areas as urban, based mainly on population criteria. However, a significant concern remains the rapid migration from rural regions to Kathmandu Valley, turning it into an overcrowded city.

Urbanization is driven by both economic and non-economic factors. In rural areas, subsistence agriculture often fails to meet basic needs, pushing people to cities in search of better jobs and higher wages. The decline of rural industries, which once provided employment for many, has also led to increased rural unemployment and poverty, prompting migration to urban centers. Additionally, social factors such as caste-based discrimination, exploitation, and social inequality motivate rural residents to seek better opportunities in urban areas. Natural disasters like floods, landslides, and droughts, which destroy property and livelihoods, further compel people to relocate. Beyond escaping rural hardships, people move to cities for access to better education, healthcare, and modern amenities.

Benefits of urbanization

While urbanization has contributed to overcrowding in Kathmandu Valley, some economists, such as Arthur Lewis and T.W. Schultz, argue that it has positive effects on agricultural development. Growing urban incomes boost demand for agricultural products like milk and vegetables, which in turn stimulates agricultural production and rural incomes. Urbanization also increases the availability of capital, which can be used for farm expansion and modernization. Rural migrants working in cities often send remittances back home, further supporting rural economies and promoting capital formation.

Urbanization also brings opportunities for education and exposure to new ideas, expanding the horizons of rural people and making them more open to change. Returning migrants, having experienced urban life, can introduce innovations such as new crops and farming techniques in their home villages.

However, the nature of rural challenges has shifted. With much of the younger population migrating to cities, rural areas are increasingly populated by the elderly and disabled. As a result, once-valuable agricultural land is left barren, and rural marketplaces are often deserted except for occasional festivals like Dashain.

Costs of urbanization

On the other hand, some economists argue that urbanization can have negative consequences for both urban and rural economies. As urban populations grow, competition for limited jobs intensifies, contributing to urban poverty and unemployment. Social problems such as crime, prostitution, pollution, and inadequate housing also increase in overcrowded cities like Kathmandu. The rise in theft, robbery, and other crimes in the valley underscores these concerns.

Urbanization also strains public services such as housing, safe drinking water, sewerage systems, electricity, and transportation. Kathmandu’s growing water and sewage issues are clear examples. Due to budget constraints, the government struggles to keep up with the demand for improved public services. Additionally, urbanization can reduce agricultural output as rural labor declines, a significant issue for a country like Nepal that increasingly relies on imported food grains.

Strategies to slow urbanization

Unlike earlier views that saw urbanization as beneficial, many now consider it a contributing factor to urban underemployment and a symptom of underdevelopment. To curb excessive urbanization, it is essential to strike a balance between rural and urban economic opportunities by reducing the focus on urban areas.

Rural development initiatives that boost incomes and create jobs can help reduce migration to cities. As rural areas become more attractive, people are less likely to leave. Therefore, comprehensive rural development programs aimed at increasing production and improving quality of life offer a sustainable solution to excessive rural-urban migration.

Since agriculture remains the backbone of Nepal’s economy, modernizing agriculture is an effective strategy to generate employment and raise rural incomes. To retain young people in rural areas, farming must be made an attractive and viable career option. Agricultural modernization—encompassing diversification and commercialization—can increase incomes and act as an incentive for young people to stay in their villages.

Another key strategy is to promote rapid industrialization, focusing on both large- and small-scale industries. In a labor-abundant country like Nepal, developing agro-based industries and rural enterprises should be a priority. These industries not only strengthen the agricultural sector but also create jobs. However, it is crucial to adapt traditional skills and products to meet changing market demands. If young people have access to better income opportunities and higher social status in rural areas, they will be less inclined to migrate to cities.

A one-day Talent Show was held in the capital recently. The event was organized by Association of Pre-school Educators Nepal (APEN) Gokarneshwar Municipal Committee in connection with the International Children’s Day. More than 250 students of different schools, teachers, principals and parents were present in the program.

Students aged below eight from 15 Montessori schools participated in the program. They gave group and individual performances during the talent show. The students performed dances, sang songs and played music. 

The Chairperson of the Parliamentary Finance Committee and Member of Parliament Santosh Chalise was the chief guest of the event. Meanwhile, the Deputy Chief of Gokarneshwar Municipality Sannani Lama, General Secretary of APEN Center Krishna Bohora, Central Member Nirmal Nepal, Praveen Jang Thapa and others were also present in the event.

The participants were given medals, letters of appreciation and tokens of love during the event. Congratulating APEN for organizing such a beautiful program, Chalise said that he is ready to cooperate with the organization in the future.

Lama said that the municipality was ready to coordinate with APEN to help students get education while learning with fun.

Coherent consciousness refers to the phenomenon where multiple individuals share a unified mental state, characterized by aligned thoughts, intentions and cognitive processes. Recent advances in neuroscientific research have highlighted the relevance of brain wave synchronization, where collaborative individuals have similar patterns of neural activity. 

Unified consciousness allows those individuals to reap the advantages of mirror neurons, letting collective creativity prosper. Consciousness as a unified experience is the notion that our experiences and perceptions form a cohesive and continuous reality. All the sensory information, knowledge and environment that we are exposed to, shape our cognition. 

There are multitude of parameters that define our cognitive process, and on this edifice, it is easy to conclude that outcomes of diverse individual cognitive processes are idiosyncratic and unique. When these diverse idiosyncratic cognitive processes merge, they form a unified field of consciousness—a creativity pool with unprecedented levels of creativity and highly enhanced problem solving. 

Neuroscience of like-minded thinking

Mirror neurons and shared mental models play a crucial role in shaping the thoughts of like-minded individuals. It can cause mirrored yawning, which is contagious. When we watch someone yawn, events of us repeating or responding to the person with the same behavior are likely. When a friend of yours cracks a joke in class—though it is not that funny and isn’t worth uncontrollable laughter—you will likely be in a situation of losing control of your behavior and responding to the situation with laughter; this laughing contagion traverses the entire class, and the person sitting on the first desk—totally unaware of the cause of laughter—responds to the circumstance with laughter too.

Mirror neurons’ ability for collective mental states could transcend to a higher degree of cognition. A friend of mine and I were working on a graph theory problem for hours—we lost count of time. Being exposed to one another’s thought process for over two years and, very recently, working on the same project trying to optimize the shortest path between two junctions, our brain could not be called anything other than synchronized brains. We didn’t have to communicate to change a line of code on our computer; no communications were required to increase junction density at specific areas; we both had the same thing in our minds, and at this point, the communication was as if made telepathically. The cognitive productivity becomes superior with diverse thoughts contributed in coherence to a single idea; the result was produced after traversing through diverse concepts of the field and aligning to multitude of theories that one puts forth. 

Advantages of coherent consciousness

The world’s best universities tend to invest tremendously in increasing diversity on campus. The reason for this is to bring ideas, backgrounds, identities, and many more from around the different corners of the world. When diverse and unique cognitive processes, fed with idiosyncratic data, bundled together, forming collective creativity, there is a pooling of creative aura. 

These universities, which are able to achieve coherence out of diversity, reap the advantage of increased creativity due to more dynamic exchange of ideas, innovative solutions, efficient problem solving, etc. They achieve strengthened social bonds, which in turn help prosper more collaboration and develop a familial environment on campus. As a result, they have the highest research activity, the highest number of publications, and the highest scholarly productivity.

Corporations tend to invest huge amounts of time and capital in their workforce to build collective intelligence. They organize multiple programs that demand collaboration, either through recreation or corporate tasks. Formation of collective awareness helps employees to not only build better social relations but also streamline decision-making and help maximize performance with productive collaboration.

Coherent consciousness transcends the limitation of geography

There are numerous examples of inventions that occurred nearly simultaneously by multiple individuals working independently on similar ideas or inventions. Most notably, the formulation of calculus is a prime instance of this phenomenon. Both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed the principles of calculus in the late 17th century, each working independently of the other. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed patents for the telephone in 1876. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace independently formulated the theory of natural selection in the 1850s. There are many more such examples, including the discovery of oxygen, X-rays, the law of conservation of energy, the Krebs cycle, etc. Even before the globalized era, most of the independent inventions occurred nearly at the same point in time.

Global coherent consciousness for world peace and advances in humanity 

One of the pioneers of the idea of a unified field of consciousness is the founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The transcendental meditation technique is proven to have significant neural activity amelioration in a person. It is claimed to enhance individual consciousness for better collective consciousness and strengthen conscious bonds in a unified field. A key aspect of Maharishi’s theory is the notion of “super radiance,” a phenomenon suggesting that a small percentage of the population engaging in TM can influence collective consciousness on a larger scale.

On a global scale, there are multiple efforts for global coherence; for instance, in Dec 2023, nearly 11,000 participants from 139 countries congregated in Hyderabad, India, for the “10,000 for World Peace” assembly to reap advantage of coherent consciousness in achieving global ambitions of peace. Many scientific symposiums, conventions, etc. tend to bring global effort for achieving global ambition via global coherent consciousness. For instance, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN, Geneva, Switzerland is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, which is home to about the majority of theoretical particle physicists on this planet. The idea of concentrating professionals from around the world is to unify the consciousness of the brilliant minds to support the progress of particle physics. 

In a nutshell, the notion of consciousness is the subject of neuroscience and spirituality together. The idea of coherent consciousness is experienced by people around the globe in their daily routine; there are tremendous examples of global coherence and efforts to manifest this novel idea. This is the pathway for continuing the progress of the most powerful cognitive being on earth. Collaboration and teamwork habits should be developed in students right from kindergarten to achieve new heights for the progress of the human race. Diverse consciousness should be coalesced to pool creativity from around the globe for achieving global ambitions of prosperity for humanity.

Manish Adhikari

St Xavier’s College, Maitighar 

The 4th Chelsea Inter-School Road Race witnessed an impressive display of young talent, with students from various schools across the Kathmandu Valley competing in a 4.7 km race. The event brought together both boys’ and girls’ teams in a spirited competition, with Budhanilkantha School emerging as the overall champion.

High-profile guests, including Mohd Firdaus Azman, Charge’d Affairs from the Embassy of Malaysia, graced the event. In his address, Azman encouraged the participants to pursue excellence, emphasizing the importance of hard work and dedication. Also present were Sannani Lama, Deputy Mayor of Gokarneswor Municipality, Nandalal Shrestha, Ward Chairperson of Gokarneswor-8, Baikuntha Manandhar, Olympian and South Asian marathon record holder, and Kiran Chemjong, captain of Nepal’s national football team. Additionally, officials such as Raju Pandey, Deputy Superintendent of Police from Boudha Police Station, Rajesh Karki, Senior Sub-Inspector from Gokarneswor Police Station, and Jitendra Shrestha, Chief of Jorpati Traffic Police, were in attendance. Representatives from the Nepal Athlete Association and a medical team from Nepal Medical College and Hospital ensured the event ran smoothly and safely.

The competition highlighted the athletic prowess of the students, with the top ten finishers in both the boys’ and girls’ categories showcasing exceptional talent. In the boys’ category, the top performers included Hasta Sunwar from Bright Horizon School, Anuj Mahat from Kankali Secondary School, and Bibek Lama from Budhanilkantha School. The girls’ category saw Sushma Yadav from Budhanilkantha School, Divyata Bhandari from Brihaspati Vidyasadan, and Sushna Thapa from Bright Horizon School leading the pack.

The event culminated with Budhanilkantha School being named the Champion School, a fitting recognition for their dominance in both boys’ and girls’ categories. The race was a memorable celebration of sportsmanship and young athletic talent, further elevated by the presence of distinguished guests and the fierce competitive spirit displayed by all participants.