My new podcast, Nepal Now, is up and running. Please take a listen, on the website or in your usual podcast player.
So far (after 16 episodes) we’ve featured how Nepal’s conflict victims are focusing on support for livelihoods not prosecutions, the key role that local communities play in responding to Nepal’s emergencies, an interview with director Deepak Rauniyar (White Sun, Highway), women in the age of Covid-19 an Indigenous perspective on tackling climate change, and more.
Continue reading“It brings the urgency to seek justice even closer when family members are reminded of that small detail that they had forgotten over the years.”
— Pooja pant, memory, truth and justice project
To its credit, the Nepali media has written regularly about successive governments’ lack of action on transitional justice since the Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed in 2006. Reporting has focused on the legal framework, which in 2015 Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled must be revised because it granted amnesty for the most serious crimes of the conflict.
In the civil war, from 1996 to 2006, the state and Maoists combined to kill 17,000 Nepalis, torturing and disappearing thousands more.
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The Nepal Government has denied that a joint team from the Nepal Army and Chitwan National Park destroyed homes belonging to landless Chepang people on 18 July 2020.
The operation “removed 8 Katha of maize crop, 9 wooden towers and 2 sheds from the area (but) the operation team has not destroyed any of those 8 HHs [households] Iiving there and any of their property,” says a letter to United Nations (UN) human rights experts dated 21 December.
Razing of the houses was condemned by organizations led by Amnesty International Nepal, which called it an “act of cruelty” and a human rights violation.
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Child marriage has risen in many countries since the world started locking down earlier this year. In fact, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) is predicting that if conditions don’t change, the pandemic will contribute to an additional 13 million marriages of children (mostly under 18) in the next decade.
The causes of child marriage are many and complex — economic, social and cultural. In Nepal, girls are often seen as a burden: raised by their parents only to be sent away to live with their husband’s family, and on top of that a girl is usually expected to carry with her a dowry for the groom’s family, which can amount to a huge amount of cash and goods, big enough to put her family in debt for many years.
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Just over a year ago President Bidya Bhandari of Nepal launched a new group, Baliyo (strong or mighty) Nepal, created to tackle the persistent malnutrition in the country that stubbornly refuses to be beaten.
Almost immediately a backlash hit. Local media reported that the group was a creation of the Chaudhary Group, one of whose companies makes Wai Wai instant noodles, a type of junk food that can be found in virtually every village of the country. One paper quoted a Chaudhary official saying that Baliyo Nepal would ‘improve’ Wai Wai to feed it to malnourished kids.
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Anyone who lives in Nepal knows about caste and untouchability — the social rules that slot people into rigid groups from which they can rarely escape. At the bottom of the caste hierarchy are the Dalits, previously known as untouchables.
Anyone living in Nepal would also be aware of the deadly, violent crimes committed against Dalits, almost always with no legal consequences. But as you will hear in the introduction to this episode of Nepal Now, the incident reports from the Nepal Monitor provide a sense of the daily indignities and violence that Dalit people face in this country.
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The remittances that migrant labourers send back to their countries contribute massively to those economies, but the impact on poverty reduction is much more complex, as a new book by Ramesh Sunam details
This article was published in Nepali Times on 15 September 2020.
As you might expect, the remittance village is punctuated by smooth, concrete houses rising among their weary-looking brick, mud and bamboo neighbours, a settlement where shiny motorcycles whine back and forth.
But in the remittance village you will also find residents who cannot even afford the price of a flight ticket to join the growing queue of fellow villagers trooping overseas to earn. It is also a place where going to work abroad actually drives some households into poverty instead of lifting them out of it.
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As of late last year Nepal started to receive money from something called the Green Climate Fund to both reduce its own emissions and adapt to climate change. So far $73 million has been earmarked from the Fund for two projects. But who decides how that money is spent?
The latest episode of the Nepal Now podcast spoke with Tunga Rai, National Coordinator of the Climate Change Partnership Programm at the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN). He thinks that climate change projects need to do a better job of incorporating the Indigenous perspective and should be based on values as well as scientific knowledge.
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This article was published in Nepali Times online, 14 August 2020.
A report published online in the journal The Lancet Global Health this week revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused 50% fewer women in Nepal than usual to give birth in hospitals, resulting in higher risks for premature births, stillborn deliveries and newborn deaths.
The study, conducted in nine hospitals across Nepal found that the stillbirth rate at hospitals and birthing centres increased from 14 per 1,000 before the lockdown to 21, and the neonatal mortality increased from 13 per 1,000 livebirths to 40.
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Filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar says his role is to examine the society he grew up in (south-eastern Nepal), not to make movies that entertain. That said, the director recently told the Nepal Now podcast that his upcoming film he will try to deliver his social commentary wrapped up in the genre of a police thriller.
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Experiences from other Asian countries show that people who have gone abroad to work can be reintegrated into the economies of their home countries but it’s a complex process that requires government leadership.
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