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Major political parties have led a number of movements for the establishment and re-establishment of democracy in a space of eight decades. Successive generations of Nepalis have taken part in these movements, offering blood, sweat, toil and tears in their perennial struggle for cherished ideals like democracy, human dignity, the rule of law and good governance. 

Despite waves of change, popular aspirations have remained unrealized, by and large, with the leaders behind these waves of change themselves grossly misusing the organs of the state to fulfill their vested interests. 

Every now and then, the top brass of the big parties remind the public of their struggle against tyranny, including years spent behind bars and torture meted out against them, forgetting completely that one cannot live on their past laurels forever.
But the people often find in the statements and acts of their erstwhile heroes tell-tale signs of dictators donning the garb of democracy. 

Their deepening impression is that the more things change, the more they remain the same—in Nepal. 

Democracy is a culture and a way of life. Who knows this better than the leaders at the forefront of democratic movements?  

But then how many of our ‘champions of democracy’ have been living by their ideals after their victory against tyranny? Select figures of the big parties, for example, have been holding leadership positions for decades on end instead of making way for transfer of power by grooming their successors. Granted that transfer of power to the younger generation was easier said than done during the decade-long insurgency and the royal rule with democratic processes largely on hold. 

But even in the post-conflict scenario, practices aimed at promoting democracy within the respective parties continue to be a rarity.    

Such is the situation that the parties do not even bother to hold their central committee meetings, leave alone general conventions and policy conventions. That’s why, a party holding a meeting becomes big news and so does another party planning its jamboree, in a democracy! 

Having helmed party leadership positions for decades and discharged their duties as the chief executive of the country, it’s time our seasoned politicians did some serious soul-searching and started adopting democracy as a way of life. 

Freeing themselves from the coteries of their kith and kin can help boost internal democracy and so can regular party meetings. 

It’s time for our leaders to practice what they preach, if they really want to protect democracy from the specter of autocracy.  

In October 2022, a new hotel was erected a mere 10 meters away from the shores of Lake Fewa. Despite violating the standard criteria of maintaining a 60-meter distance from the lake, the hotel was inaugurated by Bishnu Bhattarai, the local ward chairperson.

Ishwar Baral, the owner of the hotel, in an interview with the Centre of Investigative Journalism, expressed his admiration for the enchanting view of the lake from the hotel’s upper floors.

Two months after the inauguration of the hotel, Madhav Prasad Paudel decided to add another storey to his old house on the shores of the lake. But Pokhara Mayor Dhanraj Acharya ordered Paudel to halt the construction midway. 

Paudel waited for a month or so before resuming the construction work. The house, just 40 meters away from the shore of the Fewa, has now been turned into a hotel. Paudel claims as this house was built by my grandfather, the construction criteria around Fewa do not apply to his ancestral property.

During the local elections, Padam Lamichhane of Begnas in Pokhara-31 acquired approximately five ropani of unregistered (parti) land in Majhikuna, on the shore of Begnas Lake, to start his own hotel business. Once the foundation was laid, the metropolitan police demolished the structure, claiming it was illegal to build a structure within 65 meters of the shore, and that too on the unregistered land.

The construction materials were confiscated. But, like Paudel, Lamichhane resumed construction after two months and currently operates a hotel there. His hotel is just 10 meters from the shore of Lake Begnas.

Another resort has also opened on encroached land at Magikuna in Begnas. Built by Machchhe Gurung, a resident of Gilung in Kwoholasothar Rural Development Committee, Lamjung, this resort is just 15 meters from the lake. However, the criteria for Begnas is 100 meters. Gurung says he has built a hotel there as he owns the land.

Similar structures are being built on the shores of lakes in Pokhara. The construction criteria prepared six decades ago—leaving 65-meter distance from the shore of Fewa Lake and 100-meter from the shore of other lakes in Pokhara— still exist and apply to date. But they are rarely followed or strictly enforced.  

There is no specific data on how many structures have been built violating the criteria. To understand this, we discussed with the locals from Komagane, Fishtail Gate, Ambot, Gaurighat, Barahi, Hallan Chowk, Gairako Chautara, Khapaudi, Chankhapur and Pame, moving from east to west within the boundaries of Lake Fewa. Based on this assessment, at least 200 hotels are operating violating the criteria.

Around 100 hotels and coffee shops from Hallan Chowk to Taal Barahi Ghat and about 200 hotels from Gairako Chautara to Chankhapur have been built in the last five years. All of those structures have violated the criteria. According to the Pokhara Tourism Council, approximately 900 hotels operate in the Lakeside area, and half of them do not meet the criteria.

Kishor Dahal, a resident of Khapaudi in Pokhara-18, purchased a plot of land within the Fewa Lake area and built a house two years ago. This year, he has filled two ropanis of wetlands with earth and concrete on the lake’s shore in Sedi. He plans to build a petrol pump on this land.

Dahal claims there are no issues in filling the land registered in his name. Documents show that he purchased the land from Prem Prasad Pahari two years ago.

Similarly, three hotels have been constructed about 15 meters from the lake in Gairako Chautara within the last two years. Around 50 hotels have been built in the same manner over the past six years. 

About half of the 100 hotels in Majhikuna, on the eastern shore of the Begnas Lake, were built within the last five years. Most of them violate the construction criteria. On the northwest shore of Begnas Lake, around Pipley Danda, Saldanda, Syangkhudi, Libdi, and Begnas Lake Chowk, there are 13 new hotels that were opened fairly recently.

Sushila Pandey, a resident of Majhikuna, says the land around the lake is being developed at such a pace that it is hard to keep track.

Criteria different for different people

A two-storied coffee house that was being built at Pame Road, Khapaudi, on the shore of Fewa, is still incomplete. The metropolitan police halted the construction of the structure made of bamboo and wood.

The man who started the construction, Krishna BK, left for Dubai after his plan to open a business was halted by the city authorities. BK says it is unfair that the city decided to only bar his business plan.

“They have to stop everyone. Why should I be the only one? This isn’t fair” says BK.

Approximately 200 meters from BK’s now abandoned coffee shop stands Hotel Palm Beach. Occupying 10 ropanis of land, the hotel is just 10 meters from the lake and was built in the same year BK began constructing his coffee house.

When the hotel was under construction, a conflict had erupted between the owners and the locals over lake encroachment. The locals called the police and confiscated the keys of the bulldozer. The construction work was halted, only to resume after three months.

Some of the land occupied by this hotel is registered in the name of Toran Baniya, chairperson of Ward 15. Baniya says he has leased  the land.

Last year, Magh Raj Kandel was displaced after the metropolitan city demolished his fishpond, poultry farm, and a tea stall built on a ropani and a half of his land near Majhikuna in Begnas. Kandel passed away on 29 May 2023 due to a heart attack.

Kandel’s business was registered in his own name, and it was located approximately 25 meters from the lake. His neighbors say that Kandel had spent around Rs 500,000 to build the structures for his business. When CIJ met Kandel in April, he had said that apart from the land near the lakeshore, he didn’t have any other assets.

Two months after the authorities demolished Kandel’s structure, Machchhe Gurung, a local resident from Gilung, built a hotel on the other side of the shore. This time, the authorities had no issue with the construction. According to locals, Gurung is a relative of former Chief Minister of Gandaki Province and Vice-chairman of CPN-UML, Prithvi Subba Gurung. 

Next to Gurung’s hotel, another hotel has been running since last year. Pramod Wagle from Chitwan leased approximately 10 ropanis of land within the criteria to run the hotel. His hotel has also acquired an additional four ropanis of unregistered land.

In the same neighborhood, another entrepreneur Bikash Lamichhane has been running a restaurant since 2007 and has added two more floors this year. Even though it was built on his own land, the hotel is adjacent to the lake and does not meet the construction criteria. Lamichhane says he is not concerned about the authorities shutting down his business, as people who have built on unregistered land have not faced any consequences.

Santosh Bhujel, a resident of Pokhara-31, is worried about the haphazard construction going on around the shores of Pokhara lakes and the authorities’ lack of interest to stop it.

Bhujel runs a coffee shop approximately 300 meters from Begnas lake. Despite having his land near the lakeshore, he says he did not operate his business right next to the shore because of the construction criteria. His decision to follow the regulation is now hurting his business. 

He says the lake is no longer visible from his coffee shop, thanks to the newly constructed hotel buildings built on the lakefront. 

Shiva Prasad Pandey, a 63-year-old resident of Syangkhudi in Begnas, says he has not yet understood how the criteria works. He says he has seen the authorities demolish tea stalls and small hotels, but not those big resort hotel properties that touch the lake’s waters.

Arbitrary local governments 

As the government has restricted plotting and development on agricultural land, Pokhara Mayor Acharya has allowed the use of dozer in the wetlands, which do not fall under agricultural category as per the Land Use Regulation 2022. 

With the mayor’s decision, property transactions in and around the wetlands, as well as incidents of land encroachment, have increased.  

According to Leela Dhar Paudel, coordinator of the Water Conservation and Coordination Committee, Kaski, and chairman of the District Coordination Committee, bulldozer was operated on approximately 300 ropanis of land around the Fewa Lake since December last year.

National policies and international treaties related to wetlands and watersheds also prohibit excavation work within wetland and watershed areas. Such land should be protected. In this regard, the High Court of Pokhara heard the writ of Advocate Manoj Gharti Magar and ordered Pokhara Metropolitan not to fill the wetlands near Fewa Lake.

A week after the order of the Pokhara High Court, the Supreme Court ordered the local authorities of Pokhara to remove the encroached structures on other lakeside areas, including Fewa Lake.

Though Mayor Acharya has pledged to implement the Supreme Court’s order and demolish the structures around the lake, the city has not taken any concrete steps to free up the properties that were developed around the lakeshore in violation of the construction regulations.

Earlier, Acharya’s predecessor, Man Bahadur GC, had tried to reduce the construction criteria around Lake Fewa from 65 meters to 35 meters, only for the Supreme Court to intervene and stop further encroachment of the lake.

GC says the decision was taken because many lakefront properties are registered under individual names.

During the local elections of 2022, five parties—Nepali Congress, CPN (Maoist Center), CPN (Unified Socialist), Janata Samajwadi Party, and Rastriya Janamorcha—formed an alliance. They stated that the lakes of Pokhara are the mainstay of tourism and are linked with the province’s economy as a whole and pledged to address all the related problems. They vowed to keep the size of the lake intact, remove encroachments, and distribute compensation fairly.

Similarly, the CPN-UML promised to provide proper compensation to those property owners whose buildings and businesses fall under the “no-construction” zone.

Currently, the executive committee of Pokhara Metropolitan City has an equal number of members from the CPN-UML and the five-party alliance. However, no significant work has been done for the conservation of the lakes.

Before the election, Mayor Acharya had also committed to implementing the Pokhara Watershed Area Project and conserving the lakes in a way that would benefit the locals. However, in the last one and a half years, he has not done any work other than covering the wetlands. 

Acharya says discussions are ongoing about the long-term development plans to conserve the land in a way that does not affect its beauty.

The lakes of Pokhara were listed in the World Wetlands list in 2016. However, the local government has not yet formulated any policies to increase special monitoring and conservation of the wetlands. 

After the introduction of the federal system, Pokhara locals had expected the local governments to resolve the issue of encroachment on the lakes. But that did not happen. 

Surya Prasad Paudel of Pokhara-31 says after the local government came to power, the encroachment has increased.

Individual own 4,000 ropanis of land in around Fewa Lake 

Due to the increasing encroachments of the lake areas, the Supreme Court on April 29, 2018, ordered the local government and the Land Revenue Office to investigate the land within the boundary of Fewa Lake and recommend compensation for the individuals and cancel illegal land registrations.

Accordingly, in October 2020, Pokhara Metropolitan City formed the Fewa Lake Boundary Determination and Demarcation Committee under the leadership of Punya Prasad Paudel, the former chairperson of the Kaski District Development Committee. The committee’s report, released in February 2021, states that 881 plots of land covering 4,000 ropani of area fall within the Fewa Lake area, but are registered as individual property as per the 1963 Land Survey.

According to the locals, after the collapse of the lake dam in 1974, many people registered the land near the lake.

The report of the Fewa Lake Encroachment Inspection Committee, formed under the leadership of Bishwo Prakash Lamichhane, the then chairperson of the Pokhara Sub-Metropolitan City Development Committee, mentions that 1,692 ropanis of land that once used to be the Fewa lakebed have been registered as individual properties. 

Landowners are taxed anyway

Lekhnath Dhakal of Sundaridanda in Begnas, Pokhara-31, has land on the shores of Begnas Lake and Rupa Lake, totalling 20 ropanis within the criteria (100 meters). In 1989, the government’s Irrigation Department had compensated the land likely to be affected by rising water levels while constructing a dam in Begnas Lake.

However, after the dam’s construction, Dhakal’s steep land also got submerged under water. His land was not initially listed among the areas to be possibly affected, and so he did not receive any compensation for the land. According to Dhakanath Kandel, chairman of Ward 31, approximately 200 ropanis of land, including Dhakal’s 20 ropanis, were not listed on the initial list, and so their landowners have not received any compensation to date.

Pokhara Mayor Acharya says that because the regulations regarding environment, wetlands, biodiversity, agriculture, and land use refer to the constitution, it is difficult to take any concrete decisions and work. 

According to Dhakal, the submerged 20 ropanis of land was his registered ancestral property. However, after the dam’s construction in Begnas Lake, which raised the water level, he could not farm or make any earnings from the land.

But, he says, he has been paying Rs10,000 annually to the local government as land tax. 

Ishwor Baral, a resident of Gairako Chautara in Lakeside, says he doesn’t know when the government will come and demolish the house where they have been living for generations. He adds the city has been collecting taxes even from those land plots and buildings that violate the construction criteria.

Saraswati Lamichhane of Begnas has been unable to sell her three ropanis of ancestral land because of the criteria. Surya Paudel, a local, has also given up on the land registered in his name near Begnas Lake. 

In 1963, the government measured the area of Fewa Lake for the first time with the help of the Survey of India. The total area of Fewa Lake was 10.35 square kilometers at that time. However, the survey conducted by the Pokhara Metropolitan City in 2020 showed that the size of Fewa Lake had reduced to half, around 5.77 square kilometers. One study concludes that land encroachment is the main reason for the decrease in the lake area.

The Supreme Court has often issued orders to stop encroachments based on the survey reports of Pokhara lakes. The apex court has issued orders to protect the lakes of Pokhara, investigate and control encroachments, provide compensations, and demolish illegal structures that violated the criteria as recently as in 2007, 2012, 2018, 2022, and 2023.

Conflict in the constitutional provision

To some extent, the current constitution is also responsible for the lack of conservation of the lakes in Pokhara. Appendix 5 of the constitution places national and international environment and wetlands management under the federal government’s rights.

Similarly, Appendix 6 mentions that environmental management within the provinces falls under the authority of the provincial government, while Appendix 7 says that the federal and provincial governments jointly govern works related to biodiversity and environmental conservation. Point 10 of Appendix 8 mentions that environmental conservation and biodiversity conservation rights are granted to the local government.

Immediately after the local elections in 2017, former Chief Minister Gurung established the Lake Conservation and Development Authority to help the local government conserve lakes. Although the authority initiated discussions at the local level to identify and manage natural resources around the lakes, its Chief Executive Officer Kalpana Devkota admits they couldn’t carry out further work.

Devokta says many issues related to the lakes and the environment fall under the common rights of the federal, provincial and local governments, and this poses a challenge in proper coordination.

CIJ Nepal

The Ministry of Forest and Environment (MoFE) has started the preparations for the 28th UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP 28), being held from Nov 30 to Dec 12 in Dubai. 

We have ample time to prepare our national agendas for the summit. We are yet to discuss our issues with the COP 28 Presidency and UNFCCC secretariat and as of now, we have not set our priorities and agendas. But we will consult with various national and international stakeholders working on climate issues to set our priorities for the climate conference.

Every year, we plan to review and update previous years’ agendas and align them with the current circumstances. Our focus will encompass climate finance, mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage (L&D). One notable addition this time will be the Global Stocktake, designed to evaluate collective progress toward achieving the purpose of the Paris Agreement and its long-term objectives.

The author is chief of Climate Change Management Division at Ministry of Forest and Environment  

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a US organization that specializes in providing development assistance to underdeveloped nations. The MCC Compact, which Nepal signed in 2017, was anticipated to serve as a catalyst for the nation's infrastructure and economic development. The implementation of the agreement, however, has faced challenges due to political unrest, controversies, and geopolitical tensions.

The $500m MCC Compact between Nepal and the United States has selected two major projects: a road maintenance project and an electricity transmission project. While the electricity project seeks to address the problem of power outages and inefficiency by enhancing Nepal’s power transmission infrastructure, the road project aims to increase road upkeep, advance transportation efficiency, and lower transportation costs, consequently boosting economic activity.

While the agreement has the potential to benefit Nepal significantly, it has also drawn criticism over concerns of sovereignty and potential entanglement in regional geopolitics.

This article analyzes the positive and negative aspects of the MCC agreement’s impact on Nepal and emphasizes the need for addressing challenges to harness its potential for the country’s development while preserving its sovereignty and regional relationships.

Despite its potential benefits, the implementation of the MCC agreement has faced several complex and multifaceted challenges, manifesting in various forms, including political unrest, controversies surrounding issues of sovereignty, and geopolitical tensions. One of the major points of contention arose when some stakeholders associated the project with the Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS), a geopolitical initiative aimed at countering China's influence, raising concerns that it could potentially undermine Nepal’s sovereignty.

Critics voiced apprehensions about the deal's potential alignment with American interests and policies, fearing that it might bind Nepal to external agendas. Geopolitical anxieties were further exacerbated by Nepal’s strategically advantageous location situated between two influential neighbors, India and China, sparking concerns about how accepting aid from the US under the MCC could impact the country’s regional relations.

The agreement, caught in the midst of these intricate challenges, has not been immune to criticism concerning the perceived erosion of Nepal’s sovereignty and the potential entanglement in regional conflicts. This uncertainty surrounding the deal's implications and potential consequences contributed to delays in the ratification process through Parliament.

Consequently, the local communities directly affected by the proposed projects have voiced concerns about potential evictions, apprehensions about environmental ramifications, and anxieties related to the right compensation for land acquisition. 

These uncertainties surrounding the MCC Compact have had a tangible and adverse impact on Nepal’s development trajectory, impeding the timely flow of critical infrastructure funding and exacerbating existing challenges with power transmission and road maintenance that hinder industrial expansion and economic growth. Therefore, it is necessary to address these challenges with a comprehensive approach to ensure the realization of the agreement’s potential benefits while safeguarding Nepal’s sovereignty and fostering harmonious regional relationships.

To harness the benefits of the MCC agreement, it is crucial for the Nepali government and stakeholders to address the controversies and ensure openness in negotiations. Diplomacy should be used to alleviate geopolitical tensions and reassure Nepal’s neighbors about the country’s intentions. Seen as a game-changer for Nepal, the MCC agreement presents both opportunities and challenges for Nepal’s development. 

While it holds the potential to improve infrastructure and foster economic growth, it must be implemented with care to address concerns about sovereignty and regional relations.  The Government of Nepal should strive for transparency and engage in diplomatic efforts to overcome the hurdles and ensure successful project implementation. By doing so, Nepal can reap the benefits of the MCC Compact while preserving its sovereignty and regional links.