Submit your Article

For a country hemmed between the world’s first and second most populous nations with giant carbon footprints, clean air is no less than a luxury. 

But it won’t be fair to blame the neighbors alone for a progressively worsening air pollution in the Kathmandu valley and other parts of our country, which still has a very nominal carbon footprint.

Article 30 of the Constitution of Nepal stipulates the right to a clean environment, stating that every citizen shall have the right to live in a clean and healthy environment. 

But that right is up in smoke like several other fundamental rights. With not much industrial base to boast of, vehicular emission is a major factor behind air pollution in the country, along with forest fires. During the sweltering summer that has just passed us by, the country hogged the headlines as numerous forest fires worsened air quality further and further even as the government did precious little to control the situation. 

Air quality has improved due to the rains, which, though, has brought another set of disasters in an ill-prepared and ill-governed country.

The wildfires are gone for now, but it’s not unusual to come across scenes that make one wonder if our roads were on fire. 

Every day, ill-maintained vehicles leave behind plumes of soot on our roads under the very nose of our extremely competent government, making a mockery of high emission standards it has set vis-a-vis vehicular emission.

Under the Paris Agreement, Nepal's Nationally Determined Contribution 3.0 aims for net-zero emissions by 2050, expanding clean energy to 15,000 MW by 2030, and 15 percent of energy from clean sources by 2030.

Despite green commitments to the international community and the domestic populace, the government continues to invest in infrastructure that is sure to increase the country’s dependence on dirty fuels. The country with enough hydropower potential to meet her domestic energy needs already has a cross-border pipeline (Motihari-Amhlekhgunj petroleum pipeline) with plans to extend it to Lothar (Chitwan) and then onto Kathmandu, and another cross-border petroleum pipeline (Siliguri-Charali petroleum) on the cards.

We export green energy and import dirty fuels. What can be more ironic?

When the rest of the world is switching to green transport alternatives like electric vehicles and hydrogen engines, the government is showing some clear signs of petroleum addiction, which will bleed the national economy further and further as petroleum imports account for a large chunk of our trade deficit.

It’s time the government did a course correction and shifted focus on developing green transport systems and an economy that does not ‘run’ on dirty fuels.   

In the life of an individual, graduation is a moment to cherish—forever. This holds true for a nation as well.

Come 2026 and Nepal is set to graduate from the club of Least Developed Countries (LDCs), a grouping of 44 countries from Africa (32), Asia (8), Caribbean (1) and Pacific (3), leaving behind its 54-year association with the club, as the club chair on her last legs.

Of the three criteria for graduation—gross national income (GNI) per capita, human assets index (HAI) and economic vulnerability index—Nepal has fallen a bit short of the first criteria but met the other two, becoming the first country to graduate without meeting the GNI criterion.

Let’s revisit Nepal’s scores against the three indices over the past decade.

In 2015, also the year of a massive Gorkha earthquake that left behind a trail of deaths and destruction, followed by a blockade, Nepal’s GDI per capita stood at a paltry $659 against the minimum threshold of $1248. In 2018, 2021 and 2024, its GDI stood at $745, $1027 and $1300 against the minimum thresholds of $1230, $1222 and $1306.

On the two other parameters, Nepal has consistently performed alright.

But, as they say, a miss is as good as a mile and this rings true on the GDI front, from 2015 to 2019 (the year of the Covid pandemic) and beyond.

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, while addressing the National Assembly recently, when the ‘hallowed’ hall was fully awake (most probably), read the upcoming graduation in an albeit different light. According to the chief executive, this shows that the implementation of (his vision) ‘Prosperous Nepal, Happy Nepali’  has begun yielding results.

What does this graduation mean for the country and the people? Per the PM, the improvement in the parameters in question and the upcoming graduation is an indication of Nepal heading toward self-reliance and a rising global profile of the country.

While the graduation indicates that Nepal has grown richer, how much of the riches have trickled down to the bottom rung over the years is an open question.

Analyses suggest that graduation means Nepal will no longer have easy access to cheaper international loans, that it will impact international support and assistance that Nepal has been enjoying, the number of scholarships for Nepali students will go down and that the country will have to strive harder for bringing in foreign investment, so on and so forth.

Here’s hoping that our government will be able to make the best of the opportunities that come with the graduation as well as some shocks that come with it.

Experts say that diplomacy comes handy in such situations.   

Indeed, as Eleanor Roosevelt says, the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. 

How is this agrarian country faring in the midst of another paddy plantation season? The once fertile fields of the Madhes have the answer. 

Even in the midst of the monsoon, most of the paddy fields are lying barren in the province known as the grain basket of the country, thanks to a prolonged drought and a lack of irrigation facilities. 

This is not a new phenomenon, by the way. Drought conditions have been prevailing in Madhesh for (at least) about three years, leading to a serious scarcity of drinking water, leave alone water for irrigation. 

A couple of factors are behind this crisis situation. Erratic weather patterns resulting from climate change have played a huge part and so has the degradation of the Chure hills, thanks to an unchecked exploitation of the hills for construction materials like sand, boulders, and deforestation. Aware of the central role of the Chure as a source of water for the fertile fields of Madhesh as well as its burgeoning population, the government has a program dedicated to its conservation, but the efficacy of the program leaves much to be desired. 

The vital role of Madhes in feeding the whole country can be better understood by the fact that the province has 8,02,988 hectares of cultivated land, accounting for about 21.33 percent of total cultivated land (39,24,009 hectares) in the country. The province has 26.4 percent of the paddy fields and 26.56 percent (67,156 hectares) of the horticultural lands (2,52,818 hectares).  

How to revive the grain basket of the country? This is a crucial question before central, provincial and local governments. 

Farmers throughout the country, including in the Madhesh, have been relying on rains for cultivation since ancient times. Any government worth its name should be able to provide irrigation facilities to the farmers, in this day and age, if it is indeed serious about averting a famine. In an era of global warming and climate change, we would do well to opt more and more for less water-intensive crops. 

Also, the drought afflicting Nepal’s southern plains and beyond have laid bare a misplaced priority of the government. For decades, the government’s focus has been on transboundary water cooperation rather than on meeting domestic requirements of water for drinking, irrigation, navigation and green energy generation. 

The government should learn lessons from the parched fields and act accordingly. 

“Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done”. This is what Lord Hewart, the then chief justice of England, said while pronouncing the verdict in the case of Rex v Sussex Justices, in Sussex in 1924. A century later, this aphorism coming from a court of law in Sussex has become a law of sorts onto itself. 

With the executive and the legislative falling miserably short of public expectations by landing in one scandal after another, the sovereign people have been pinning high hopes on another vital organ of the state—the judiciary—for quite some time. In this day and age of information and communication technology, where the people have information and knowledge at their fingertips, even the hallowed chambers of law cannot escape public scrutiny. 

People and the fourth estate—the free media—split hairs over judgments coming from the court of law, which is actually good for democracy, human rights and the rule of law. If it is bad for the rule by law, then so be it. At a time when the image of the executive and the legislature has taken a huge beating, the judiciary is under tremendous strain to maintain the sanctity of state institutions. The final interpreter of the Constitution can shoulder this task of Himalayan magnitude only by keeping itself above controversies galore. 

As they say, action speaks louder than words. Talking about action, a division bench of the Supreme Court has issued a verdict in a case related to ancestral property, stating that daughters married before 1 Oct 2015 cannot lay claim to ancestral property. Through this judgment, the court has put to rest a long-pending dispute over ancestral property, at least for now.  

As indicated earlier, the onus is on the top court to remain squeaky clean by minimizing extraneous influence to the maximum possible extent. For quite some time, the judiciary has been courting controversy over the appointment of justices close to a party or the other. It is a given that such appointments increase the risk of miscarriage of justice that can lead to all sorts of unwanted consequences for the country and the people. 

Some lay people, including skeptics, predicting judgments based on the benches hearing the cases is no good tiding—neither for the judiciary, nor for the state as a whole. As the top court of the country continues to deal with piles and piles of important cases ranging from property disputes to the protection of national boundaries and more, here’s wishing that an infallible sense of justice prevails in the hallowed chambers, driven by international conventions, precedents, our customs, traditions, societal norms and values as well as our own charter.