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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

Nepal has long been surviving on the edge, miraculously saving itself from falling off the precipice of a failed nation. As one sits to ponder over the developments in the country, one can’t miss how we have become a perfect test case for what theorists describe as countries with failing institutions. 

Some years back, Lokman Singh Karki, the chief of the anti-corruption body, had almost brought all the powers to their knees. Appointed by political consensus as the head of the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority, Karki slowly started to concentrate power around him. 

It is widely accepted that our institutions are inherently corrupt, and thus, if scrutinised properly, it is difficult for any officer to come out clean. This fact has created a general perception that such anti-corruption bodies are to be managed through illegal means and not confronted. This mass fear among all government bodies made the head of ‘Akhtiyar’ extremely powerful. One officer then working in the same office testified that Karki had created a power gang of close relatives and confidantes, and through them he terrorized all major power centres in the country. 

The same officer relates an incident when Karki once called the then IGP to his office at 9 in the morning for a meeting, and kept him waiting outside till 5pm, and then left his office without meeting the Chief of Police. All this while LSK was making fun of the head cop who was being beamed on his CCTV screen. Such sadistic behaviour is possible only in a country with no institutional accountability. Nepal merits one of the top positions in that category. 

Also read: Race to stupidity

Recently, former Indian Ambassador to Nepal, Ranjit Rae, has revealed in his book that not only have Nepal’s political leaders been inviting the embassy in Kathmandu to micromanage internal matters, members of other institutions have also been continuously involving the embassy in undue interference. He writes that while in office in Kathmandu, he was consulted by the Home Minister regarding the appointment of the new chief of police. And, unsurprisingly, he says all four prospective candidates lined up in his office to convince him of their willingness to work in close cooperation with their Indian counterparts.

A small incident in the complex geopolitical juxtaposition, this shameful but not surprising revelation has shown that Nepal, as a nation, has a very fragile institutional framework to support statecraft in this difficult time and terrain. And our political leaders, in their penchant for continuous uncertainty, have made it worse.

After the LSK nightmare, the country recently faced a disastrous dismantling of a strong political arrangement led by Prachanda and Oli, the ‘communist’ leaders giving slogans for a communist unity. As the country is in desperate need of stability, the cloud wisdom of people favored their promise for stability and the united coalition got a nearly two-thirds majority. But in three years, the powerful government became a symbol of the greatest failure in Nepal’s political history. 

This failure opened the door for the judiciary to also get involved in brinkmanship and power brokering, as recent news headlines suggest. These developments point to yet another era of utter failure, and the aspirations of Nepal’s youth to see a state that supports a level playing field and encourages investments in new technologies and skills, making the ecosystem more conducive to economic growth, is far from sight.

Also read: Kathmandu: City of Garbage

To aptly theorize such a shameful dysfunction, we refer to “Why Nations Fail” published in 2012, Co-authored by the M.I.T. economist Daron Acemoglu and the Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson again and again. The book’s main argument is that countries thrive when they develop “inclusive” political and economic institutions, and they fail when those institutions become “extractive” and concentrate power and opportunity in the hands of a few.

“Sustained economic growth requires innovation,” the authors write, “and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics.”

“Inclusive economic institutions, are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions,” which “distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy.” Conversely, extractive political institutions that concentrate power in the hands of a few reinforce extractive economic institutions to hold power.

The lesson of history is that you can’t get your economics right if you don’t get your politics right. And, the youth of this country should brace up for this long struggle to set things right, right at the grassroots. Nation-building has to be approached brick by brick, an institution at a time. 

My paternal grandfather was a very down-to-earth person to the degree that he went around the homestead barefoot, talked very less to the point of being taciturn, and minded his own business to the extent of being solitary. Unlettered, but a man of infinite wisdom. Of small stature but having a stately bearing. Nonetheless, temporal and celestial matters received his attention in equal measure. 

In his youth, he had journeyed down to the North-eastern plains of India and got himself a government job. Half a year in the job, in a vivid dream, he saw his widowed father: all dressed in white, greyed hair and beard, and a sickly countenance. Such was his devotion to his father that he quit the job without a second thought and returned home for good.

 Year after year, season after season, day after day, he worked the fields, tended to his livestock, and silently endured the vagaries of nature. Not even once he lamented the government job he quit in a blink nor grieved for the creature comforts it could have afforded him and his large family. He was at peace with his wife, his deities, his rustic existence, and quietly proud of his “lowly” peasant life.

***

At age ten I was a dangerous little man, for I was endowed with a devilishly curious mind and a commensurately creative bent. Armed with bundles of tangled copper wires, parts salvaged from all kinds of electronics, nuts and bolts, and other junk, I was on a dogged pursuit of making electricity from fire, more precisely, from embers. The devil should know, from where I got this sinister idea.

Many times, my grandfather had seen me put my quixotic idea into action behind the cowshed. The incendiary accouterments I had made me look like a potential arsonist to him. For me, he was a potential saboteur of my grand secret mission. Each day, we were playing hide and seek. Each time he found me engaged in the wizardry of electricity-making, he would banish me to the edge of our village where the banshees lived but to no avail. I would return more determined, more motivated than ever for creating trouble. 

Also read: High consumer spending will be a boon for the economy

That year, until Dashain arrived, our relationship remained rocky. Even then, it was purely diurnal. At night, peace would be restored between me and him. We shared a bed of rock, so to speak. Instead of something cushy and comfortable, he preferred a woolen rug on top of a hay mattress. He liked it hard. Perhaps, it was a cure for his slowly curving back.  And I did not mind it either.

***

Right after the rains end in late September, nature triumphantly returns to its resplendent glory: Life-giving water is plentiful, serpentine brooks and streams sing a mellifluous murmur, verdant woodlands come alive with tweeting little birds, and idle clouds sail across in the blue skies. Planting season has just ended, mother earth is bountiful, and village folk go about their daily lives with a buoyed spirit. A mildly intoxicating fragrance impregnates the whole atmosphere. This pervasive aroma is the harbinger of grand festivities in the hills of Western Nepal. 

Pupils whose places of learning had closed for the holidays or who somehow managed to break free from their drab school life would first appear in the village. Second, came the lahures and their families who had been grinding away the whole year in Jalandhar, Haryana, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Dimapur, Shillong and cities in India. Last arrived the bureaucrats (a sizable number) and their city-born bratty kids, and fair-complexioned fragile wives. 

On the ridge of a hillock, along the tortuous and treacherous foot trails, you could see a motley procession of homebound souls, decked in bright colors, lugging heavy bags but determinedly pushing towards their homes. This influx of out-migrants would last for about a month. The old folks likened this annual homecoming to the fowls returning to their roosts in the twilight hours.

***

It was customary for these returnee members of the community to pay a visit to the elderlies, hand them sweetmeats, nuts, tobacco, clothes, etc. and listen to their past exploits, stories and imbibe some practical wisdom. In return, the repatriates would share with them the trials and tribulations of their journey back home, stories of faraway lands, foreign people, interesting happenings, and tidbits about the changing world. 

Every family would paint their house ochre and milky white, and remove the weeds around the house and front yard. Even this sleepy settlement of around ten score mortals would turn into a hubbub of lively activities. Not even affected a tiny bit by the excitement in the air, my grandfather went about quietly preparing for Dashain. Being the patriarch of the family, he oversaw and participated in hay collection for the cattle, beautification of the old house and homestead, and restocking provisions.

*** 

Maha Navami would be the day everyone would be waiting for. Anointed with aromatic oils and dressed in all sorts of fineries, the old and young would journey to the Kot Ghar on the hilltop. Around eight in the morning, rhythmic beating of drums would start to sound from all directions and eventually merge with the music coming from the Kot Ghar. 

Senility had set in. So my grandfather started a little bit early. Along the stretch of around three kilometers to the Kot Ghar, he trundled slowly, stopping at every bend and at every encounter with a friend or relative his age to make a small chat. They reminisced about the good old days, the times of their youths, and the ominous times that surrounded them. 

Also read: Dashain: Then and now

At the Kot ghar, the prized spot under the awning would be waiting for him from where he would have an unobstructed view (darshan) of the Khadga and Chattra (local deities) and the gory spectacle. He was rather not fond of animal sacrifice so he continued to chat with his friends even after the animal sacrifices started. 

Those special spots were off-limits for us kids. We found our own vantage points. The ensemble of musicians played a hypnotic rhythm occasionally punctuated by the sky-rending roar of the dhankuri baja (a really long pipe). This ancient music was perhaps the enabler to all the bloodshed that ensued later. Hundreds of animals, big and small would be killed at the maulo (sacred altar). At around three in the afternoon, I and my grandfather would return home at a leisurely pace. 

On the auspicious day of Vijaya Dashami, my grandfather would be sitting on an ornate rug, putting tika and jamara, blessing the receiver with Om Jayanti Mangala Kali Bhadrakali Kapalini mantra, some other benedictions, and giving away sweets, fruits, and paper bills according to the status and gender of the receiver. I would receive the tika as soon as it began so that I could break my fast and go devour the delicacies. After that, I would sit beside him all day long. 

Tika ceremony would continue late into the evening till everybody who had arrived from far and wide had received his blessings, and only he would break his fast. With this, the greatest festival of the year climaxed. The next day itself, family members who had gathered for the celebration would start to disperse in all four directions.

I cherish the fond memories of the many magical, mystical, and majestic childhood Dashains that I was a part of and in which my paternal grandfather played the central role. After he passed away thirteen years ago, I have not been to the Kot Ghar even once and Dashain has not been the same for me ever since.

The author comes from Gulmi, and is a community development professional based in Kathmandu

Let us face it, talking about menstruation and related issues is still a taboo in South Asia. You invariably get a shocked eye or a raised eyebrow if someone brings it up casually. It is a culture in this part of the world to wrap the sanitary napkin packet in a newspaper or put it inside a dark bag when you purchase it from the medical store. 

When I started my periods, sanitary napkins were hard to get even in Kathmandu. Luckily, my mum used to DIY pads for my sister and me at home with cotton, a sheet of plastic, and a gauge. I have hardly used recycled cloth for my periods and I have never felt so lucky. I have heard dozens of embarrassing stories of my friends and sisters who used cloth pieces during periods and got infections or leakage/staining.

I think it was 1998-99 when some companies started importing the pads from India and that is when I started buying them too. For many years, I bought the packets as if I was transporting something illegal inside a wrapped newspaper or a black plastic bag. With time, I asked them not to wrap the pads in anything as I felt it was as normal as people buying diapers.

More than 20 years have gone by and women and girls in Nepal are still struggling with access to menstrual products. It is not a new thing to read that thousands of Nepali girls still skip school due to periods or lack of sanitation in school. Every year many I/NGOs are working with communities in awareness-raising regarding hygiene and use of menstrual products.

Last week, once again, the whole tax issue on sanitary pads surfaced. They already attract 15 percent customs duty and 13 percent Value Added Tax. Now the news was that an additional 10 percent is to be imposed on the old sum. According to the Inland Revenue Department, Rs 342.31 million was collected on 1.17 billion worth of sanitary napkins imported last year. Whereas the world is working to make these products accessible to each and every girl child and woman for free, our own government is shamelessly increasing the taxes.

Also read: What if… sanitary pads were made free?

Let us do some math. If a girl has her first period at the age of 11 and each year she uses 15 packets of sanitary napkins, considering today’s per packet price of Rs 215, she is spending Rs 3,225 a year. And keeping the price constant for another 35 years (which is not possible but I do it here just for the heck of a general calculation), she will be spending approximately Rs 112,875 only on the pads.

Apart from all these expenses, the inaccessibility of the product, and the stigma regarding periods, in the past couple of years the issue of sanitary pads piling up in landfills and the time they take to decay has also become a matter of concern. To address that, the west has come out with an amazing invention called the menstrual cup: a magical invention that has undoubtedly revolutionized the whole idea of having periods and handling them. The price of a silicon cup, just a touch bigger than the size of an espresso shot glass, ranges from $10 to $45-50 and it has a 10-year recycling life. 

Personally, I have been using the cup for over four years and have been recommending it to my friends. I started using one while I was struggling to recover not only from my endometriosis cyst surgery but also from the tampering that my body had to go through due to the surgeon’s negligence. (That is another story that can separately fill a whole page.) My periods were pretty heavy and I was not confident enough to go out using a napkin because I thought I would stain. 

The menstrual cup did give me confidence, and it is easy maintenance in the western world where you have access to clean drinking water even from your taps. Here in Nepal, we are still fighting for a separate washroom and clean sanitation, forget clean water to wash your cup every time you dump blood and reuse it. So, ultimately, the menstrual cup can be considered a luxury item that is only useful for women who can afford to buy mineral water every time when she is out and can thus wash her cup for reuse.

So, at the end of the day, the incompetent government should open its eyes to consider rebating the taxes, even if it cannot make the sanitary pads completely tax-free. Women and girls (who are going to be your future vote banks) are half the population and their basic needs should be taken seriously.

They are already cursed to be born with a vagina in this part of the world and the government is not making it any easier.