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The coronavirus pandemic and the omicron waves have put frontline sanitary workers, mainly those working in public toilets in the Kathmandu Valley, under increased public gaze. This write-up aims to bring to the fore a typical workday of these workers tasked with both sanitary and managerial roles through a brief conversation with two workers stationed at a public loo.

Sanitary staff of public loos, especially of those located at nerve centers like Ratnapark, are early birds. A typical workday starts at around 5 am and ends tentatively at 9 pm, says Rabin KC. The first of the users arrive quite early, but they are few and far between. The users may be cleaners of public buses, owners of tea stalls, drivers, etc.

The first round of cleaning is over by 7 am, says KC. As for the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), KC says: There’s no question of doing the cleaning work without putting on safety gear like gloves, boots and mask.

Apart from the public toilet at Ratnapark, his work stations include addresses like Pokhara Dohori Saanjh, Fewa Dohori Saanjh, Ebizza and Fire (all located in Thamel), not to mention hospitals where sanitary workers have to put on heavy overalls equipped with boots and gloves while at work, running a sweat all along.

Do the workers have to buy those safety gears or do the contractors provide them?

KC says the contractors provide the gears. That’s some relief for these workers, especially in trying times like the current pandemic.

Asked about the behavior of users of the loo at Ratnapark, KC turns a bit critical.

Out of 100 users, 15 to 20 don’t clean up after their acts—they don’t pour water even when they are done, causing inconvenience to others streaming in—observes KC.

Rajan Deula, stationed at the same loo, joins in: Out of every 10 users, only 2-3 people clean the fecal matter with water. What does this reveal about our health and hygiene standards?

By the way, this is not for want of water, he adds: The nearby well has dried up, so we buy tanker water to keep the public loo clean.

The public loo with hot water facilities for bathing used to pull crowds. With hot water no longer available, the crowd has thinned. Nowadays, a handful of cleaners and drivers come for bathing once a week or so, per Deula.

Back to the user behavior. Despite our constant encouragement to pour water before and after use, the users pay no heed, KC laments, referring to the 15-20 percent bracket.

That’s not the end of problematic behavior at the public loos, though.

About 20 percent of users still spit paan, other tobacco products and throw cigarette butts. Out of every 100 or so users, five to 10 come smoking, says Deula.

In the past, some women users used to dispose of sanitary pads inside the toilet and not in the bin, according to KC. Such incidents used to cause blockages necessitating major repairs, each costing up to Rs 4,000, per KC. Such acts are rare these days, much to the relief of sanitary staff and users alike.

Differently-abled people, staff of the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) and personnel from the Nepal Army and the Nepal Police, including the Traffic Police, get services for free, according to KC and Deula.

Some users try to slip out without paying, says KC. This happens when traffic is heavy, on occasions like protests and big festivals.

That means more revenue than on normal days? Not necessarily. KC offers an interesting insight.

At such times, 15-20 percent users leave without paying, KC offers a rough estimate. The lack of CCTV cameras has only helped those slippery creatures by offering an easy escape. When sought money for using the loo, some people falsely identify themselves as metropolitan staff, security personnel and refuse to pay, Deula points out.

Average daily income? Deula says it is well within the range of Rs 2,000-2,500.

Despite the public health challenges that seem to be growing even in post-pandemic situations, Deula says with confidence, KC firmly by his side: There’s no problem in operating the public toilet by maintaining the standards of safety.

Their confidence notwithstanding, it is necessary to conduct regular training for sanitary staff in view of emerging health challenges where our public toilets can easily become epicenters of diseases. However, it’s not only frontline sanitary staff who need training.

Drawing from the experiences of Deula and KC, it can be said that toilet training for users is absolutely necessary, regardless of their age and gender, to improve the condition of public toilets, apart from provisions for punitive action against errant behavior.

Asked about the role of government entities in improving the condition of public toilets, Deula shoots, point-blank: The KMC collects land rent, it doesn’t do much else.

Hopefully, toilet training for users and government entities (with the main focus on effective ways to run these infrastructure so critical to public health and well-being) will enable sanitary staff like KC and Deula to feel a bit less sad and tired when they leave for home from work at the end of a typically long and hard workday.

I get the jitters when I visit hospitals, whether it’s to see a family member, a friend, or for some other reason. I have never been hospitalized in my life. Call it the irony of it all—a week back, I was at the BP Memorial Teaching Hospital, fidgeting in a chair in nervous anticipation outside the OT (operation theater). My wife sat beside me.

After the age of 45, most people need reading glasses. I did after 50, nothing abnormal, only age-related—presbyopia, the doctor said. But things changed. My vision for distance seemed to fall in my mid-sixties—nothing to fret about; I got power lenses for nearsightedness.

After a year, I seemed to have problems with my right eye—blurry vision, even with glasses. I saw the doctor again. He diagnosed my right eye with macular edema: fluid build-up in the macula, in the center of the retina.

Nothing alarming; it’s in its early stages. However, as I had underlying conditions like diabetes and hypertension, timely medication was advisable. The doctor said I needed to take three injections in the eye, one each month—the sooner, the better.

The doctor further added that as the clinic did not have the required facilities, he would administer the injection at the hospital where he worked—in the operation theater. That scared the wits out of me.

Since the new coronavirus variant had hit Kathmandu hard, my wife and I felt edgy when we got off the cab at the hospital. Thank the stars—there was no crowd, only one patient in the OT lounge. He sat beside his wife, all masked up, just like we were.

As we struck a conversation, he told me he had come for his third and last shot. Curious, I asked if the previous injections helped. He sounded confident the medication had improved his vision by 90 percent.

As we waited, the nurse at the counter approached and marked our eyelids with sticky paper tape—his left and mine right, and asked us to wait. She appeared to be the only staff member and seemed stressed, as she did not seem forthcoming when I asked some questions.

A little later, another nurse joined her, and the reason for her brusque manner became clear. She was lamenting about a problem at home to her fellow sister: the coronavirus had struck four of her family members. Still, she had to report for duty—she moaned.

Time seemed to drag on leaden feet as we sat tight. The sister at long last approached and asked us to put on gowns and shed our shoes. She then ushered us into the glass door with the ominous-looking letters—OT (Operation Theater).

The room was a small cubicle with the operating room behind a glass partition. The nurse asked me to wait as the other patient entered. I had a partial view of the main chamber through the glass.

A TV screen hung by a wall as the room seemed busy with masked nurses and staff pacing back and forth in green gowns and surgical skull caps. I could not see the doctor, but the room seemed to buzz with several young fellows who appeared like interns.

I sat tight with muddled thoughts and butterflies in my stomach. As my eyes fell on the TV screen through the glass partition, it showed a film on what looked like an eye operation.

Then I got a nasty jolt—it was not just a random film but live footage of the fellow patient with me a little earlier. I cringed and hurriedly averted my eyes as a gloved hand approached with a hypodermic syringe.

In barely 20 minutes, it was over, and the nurse summoned me. I was in a stupor as I lay on the operating table. I do not precisely recall what happened next as I got blinded by the glare of the surgical light—I just had blurry images that looked like gloved hands briskly working on my eye.

Before I knew it, it was all over: no pain, no sensation of the needle—nothing. The doctor told me to see him after three weeks. The ordeal was over.  

Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba just completed a three-day official visit to India upon the invitation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since the visit was arranged in a short period, there were anxieties and speculations in Nepali media on its purpose, even though regular exchange of high-level visits has been an integral component of bilateral ties. The visit happened two days after the Chinese Foreign minister Wang Yi’s three-day trip to Kathmandu and one day after the BIMSTEC meeting.

It also took place on the backdrop of Nepali parliament’s ratification of the US-funded MCC compact, which was strongly resisted by the front organizations of left parties. Most interestingly, while both extra-regional powers—the US and China—have been competing for strategic space by offering special development packages to Nepal under the BRI and the MCC, India has adopted a more astute diplomacy.

The MCC compact perhaps was not a major concern for India given its broad strategic-level partnership with the US globally and the latter’s acknowledgment of India’s geographical advantage in the region. Moreover, as per their 13 January 2017 joint statement, India and the US share a commitment to promoting economic growth, development, regional cooperation and connectivity under the MCC.

As far as the BRI is concerned, India might have felt more comfortable after the formation of a new government in Kathmandu under Deuba. Prime Minister Deuba categorically urged the Chinese to develop projects under the BRI ‘only under grant and aid assistance or through investment’. Moreover, Chinese influence in Nepal has been waning since the Supreme Court’s scrapping of the Nepal Communist Party. China failed to prevent the MCC’s passage despite using all its diplomatic, soft power, and coercive tools, going to the extent of effectively blocking the two China-Nepal trading points since the onset of the MCC debate in Nepal.

Given the closeness and warmth in bilateral relations and their mutual dependency, this kind of high-level visit was overdue. It happened after a gap of four years and following wrangling over border issues since November 2019. There was a vacuum in political communications after Nepal’s issuance of a new political map in May 2020. Although some high-level official visits happened after the map’s ratification.

Another driving factor behind the visit could be the pressing need to support each other in tackling a looming energy crisis in the subcontinent due to the Ukrainian conflict. Although Nepal depends on India, both for electricity and fossil fuel, in the long term, India needs the support of Nepal to achieve its Paris and Glasgow commitments on climate change and to realize Prime Minister Modi’s vision of “One Sun One World One Grid”. Therefore, of the four agreements signed during PM Deuba’s visit, two were related to energy including one concerning Nepal’s joining of the India-led Global Solar Alliance. The other one was an exchange of agreement on the supply of petroleum products between the IOC and the NOC.

This visit stood out from other more recent high-level visits from Nepal, as it went beyond routine delegation-level meetings and signing of MoUs. The first attraction of the visit was PM Deuba’s trip to the BJP headquarters. This was the first time a Nepali prime minister officially visited the party office of the ruling Indian party. It suggests a deep level of relationship as well as political maturity of the Nepali Congress and the BJP, both of which strongly believe in multiparty democracy, democratic values, norms, and constitutionalism.

Moreover, despite the many similarities between the NC and the BJP, there was no party-to-party MoU, unlike between the then NCP and the Chinese Communist Party in September 2019. This again shows that each party respects the independent functioning of the other and avoids imposing its values. This visit also sent a message to other Nepali political parties that the NC could be the priority party of the BJP in Kathmandu.

Another important part of PM Deuba’s India visit was his Varanasi sojourn. Uttar Pradesh has a special relationship with Nepal given its geographical contiguity, cultural linkages, as well as its status as an educational hub for many Nepalis. Most importantly, it is the birth center of the democratic movement in Nepal. Most Hindu Nepalis believe that taking a holy dip in the Ganges in Varanasi could help them achieve salvation. The only Nepal study center in India is located at Banaras Hindu University.

The Varanasi visit again shows that India has upgraded high-level visits from Nepal to the level of those from major countries like Japan, the US, and China. High-level visits from these countries since 2014 were hosted in provincial cities like Varanasi, Ahmedabad, and Mamallapuram respectively. PM Deuba was received by UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and thousands of other city dwellers and cheering students standing by the roadside. This too was a first in Nepal-India relations.

Although PM Deuba stayed in India for under 72 hours, the visit was well received by people of both the countries. During their joint press briefing, both leaders acknowledged fruitful discussions on wide-ranging issues. They reviewed progress in implementation of Indian projects in Nepal and agreed to further deepen and facilitate trade, energy, investment, and connectivity ties. In another major achievement of the visit, India acknowledged Nepal as one of the main pillars of its ‘neighborhood first’ policy.

As Hubert Humphrey, former Vice President of the United States, once said, “Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on”. The recent Nepal visit of Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Yi and the official India visit of Nepal’s Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba should be analyzed within Nepal’s evolving political context. The resumption of high-level meetings, regardless of immediate gains, should also be seen as a good start in the rebooting of Nepal’s relations with India and China.

For example, Prime Minister Deuba raised outstanding border issues during the summit with his Indian counterpart and there was general understanding to address it through dialogue. This was indeed an icebreaker in the Indo-Nepal border dispute. Similarly, Nepal has successfully communicated with China its continued need for development assistance, preferably grants.

Nepal’s relations with two big neighbors have gone through many ups and downs in the past six years. KP Oli, now the leader of the main opposition, in his first stint as prime minister, signed the ‘Transit and Transportation Agreement’ with China in 2016, aiming to diversify Nepal’s third-country trade. In his second stint, Oli led the process to amend Nepal’s constitution to unveil a new map of Nepal by incorporating Kalapani, Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh.

However, Oli’s foreign policy approach was criticized for its vacillation between two neighbors, initially tilting towards China and later making overtures towards India. Oli famously ratchetted up anti-India sentiment through nationalistic rhetoric, including mocking India’s national emblem and also making an unsubstantiated claim over Lord Rama’s birthplace. However, in his last few months in office, Oli extended an olive branch to India by meeting India’s intelligence chief in Baluwatar and expressing his intent to mend fences by resuming high-level meetings. It was viewed by many as a 180-degree foreign policy turn from China towards India—just to save his chair.

When Deuba came to power in July 2021, he had challenges of improving strained relationships with both China and India. The recent visit from China seems to be more of a Chinese push, particularly after the disintegration of Nepal Communist Party, the formation of Deuba-led government, and parliamentary ratification of the MCC compact.

PM Deuba and his team seem to have made many attempts to reach out to India, including for party-to-party exchanges and interactions.  In late August 2020, the NC invited the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Foreign Affairs Department Chief Vijay Chauthaiwale for a Nepal visit and an NC team led by Prakash Sharan Mahat went to India.

In light of growing India-China competition in Asia, the US alliance with India, the American bid to counter China, the economic challenges brought by Russia’s invasion to Ukraine, and development challenges posed by climate change and the coronavirus, Nepal needs to reboot its foreign policy, particularly with its two big neighbors, and the resumption of high-level meetings is a step in right direction.

In foreign policy literature, weak states are those that lack resources or economic power or, alternately, those without strong foreign relations. Understanding its geography is vital to understating Nepal’s foreign policy, but in the emerging world order with multipolarity and multilateralism, it is equally important to understand how a state can maintain its foreign policy space bilaterally and multilaterally—regardless of its size and location.

The 2015 constitution of Nepal aims to pursue “an independent foreign policy based on the Charter of the United Nations, non-alignment, principles of Panchsheel, international law and the norms of world peace, taking into consideration of the overall interest of the nation.” However, these guiding principles enshrined in the constitution need to be tweaked in line with the emerging world order and evolving relationships.

For example, the principle of neutrality has also been evolving. For example, Switzerland has abandoned its traditional neutrality to join Western countries in imposing sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. Together with 141 UN member states, Nepal voted in favor of a UN resolution deploring the invasion, although Nepal’s two big neighbors China and India abstained from voting. Nepal’s position this time was strikingly different to those of India and China, not because Nepal wanted to be different, but because Nepal chose a straightforward position to call a spade a spade.

For decades, although there has been occasional tilting towards one or the other, Nepal’s geography as a landlocked country has always been considered a key for balancing India and China. The traditional sense of balance of power was largely based on the principle of being cautious to the interests of its neighbors rather than maximizing Nepal’s opportunities as an economic link. Nepal’s new foreign policy approach to India and China, two emerging global powers, should be based on a connectivity-driven development strategy with a shift from a ‘landlocked’ state to a ‘land-linked’ state, focusing on cross-border infrastructure investments for transport, trade, information and power connectivity.

The ratification of the MCC compact has signaled to the international community that Nepal is open for foreign aid investment. This might have worked as a reverse psychology: China decided to send its foreign minister to assure Nepal on Sino-Nepal relationships.

A sense of competition among major powers in supporting its development is what Nepal needs for the self-sufficiency of its economy. Most importantly, Nepal’s foreign policy reboot should be based on two principles: The principle of engagement with all major powers for Nepal’s socio-economic development, and the principle of mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity, security and sovereignty.

During the recent visit of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang, Nepal and China reinvigorated bilateral ties by signing nine agreements, related to grass to railway and vaccines to economic and technical cooperation. None of these agreements, however, were about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), from which many countries in the world are benefitting as a development financing mechanism.

As a follow up to Wang Yi’s visit, Nepal needs to put more effort into achieving its long-term strategic goals by focusing on results-oriented discussions on security, development assistance and investment (including on BRI), as well as transit, trade and tourism.

Nepal has also experienced a blockade-like situation from China since January 2020. China has halted issuing visas to Nepali traders. China is Nepal's second largest trade partner after India; however, it is not the second largest trade partner for Nepal's exports. This means Nepal needs more open and productive follow up discussion with China on a preferential trade agreement.

In 2016, Nepal signed a landmark Transit and Transportation Agreement with China, followed by the signing of protocol on its implementation in 2019. However, Nepal’s transit deal with China has made no headway even after six years. Similarly, Nepal signed on to the BRI in 2017 with much expectation, but so far not a single project has taken off. These examples clearly point to lack of direction, planning and negotiation with China on issues of strategic importance.

Nepal’s relations with India have been severely strained, particularly after the 2015 undeclared blockade and dispute over Kalapani. There were no high-level visits between India and Nepal after the global spread of coronavirus. Although the main opposition party speculated that Prime Minister Deuba went to India to seek its blessings ahead of elections, this official visit has rather opened up a door to discuss all outstanding issues and strengthen multi-faceted relations.

Nepal and India agreeing to expand sub-regional cooperation in power and energy under the framework of BBIN (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal) and to engage in bi-directional power trade are welcome news given the potential of clean energy to tackle the challenges posed by climate change. However, the real success of Deuba’s recent visit will depend on whether India will be open to resolve border disputes, grant more air routes, import more electricity during the summer, provide access to Bangladesh for electricity export, and be open for China-India-Nepal cross-border infrastructure development under the ‘trans-Himalayan connectivity’ concept.

With both India and China, Nepal should continue emphasizing its ambition and aspiration to be a country that could help markets in South, Central and Southeast Asia integrate.

The author is a member of the board of directors at the Institute of Foreign Affairs, Nepal

A shorter version of this article was published in the print edition of The Annapurna Express on 7 April 2022.