Sixty-five-year-old Rita Rai still has not received emergency relief in the remote village of Mahadevsthan in Kavre district, 100 km south of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KAVRE DISTRICT, Nepal, May 5 2015 (IPS)

Just over a week after a dreadful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked Nepal, displaced families are gradually – but cautiously – resuming their normal lives, though most are still badly shaken by the disaster and the proceeding aftershocks that devastated the country.

However, delivery of humanitarian aid and basic relief supplies remains slow, hindered by the scale of the tragedy. With the annual summer monsoon just around the corner – and heavy rains already lashing some parts of the country – experts say the clock is ticking for effective relief efforts.

“We have stopped crying out of fear because we need to move on now and be brave." -- Sunita Tamang, a teenager from rural Nepal who lost her home and school in the recent quake
As of May 3, the death toll was 7,250 in 30 districts, with half of them in Kathmandu and its neighbouring Sindupalchok district, according to the Nepal Red Cross Society (NRCS), the largest humanitarian NGO in the country.

A further 14,122 people have been injured.

Over one million families have been displaced in 35 districts, while over 297,000 houses have been completely destroyed.

The United Nations says close to eight million people – over a quarter of Nepal’s population of 27 million – have been impacted by the crisis.

Of these, about 3.5 million are in need of food aid. The World Food Programme (WFP) has issued an urgent appeal for 116.5 million dollars to deliver aid to those most in need – some 1.4 million people – over the next three months.

The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), meanwhile, is worried about the plight of the country’s wheat harvest.

The agency had predicted a yield of 1.8 million tonnes in 2015, but is concerned that this forecast will change, as farmers struggle to access devastated fields and deal with severely damaged drainage systems and irrigation canals.

As the government scrambles to meet the needs of its people, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) announced Tuesday that it had begun to airlift 80 metric tonnes of humanitarian aid to the worst-affected areas.

According to a statement on the agency’s website, “[The] aircraft will deliver water, sanitation, and hygiene supplies, such as chlorination material, diarrhoea and cholera kits, as well as water bladders, to provide clean and safe water supplies as fears of an outbreak of waterborne diseases grow. Also on board are health kits and tarpaulins, with many families having fled to open spaces under threat of further aftershocks.”

Families yearn for normalcy

“We have stopped crying out of fear because we need to move on now and be brave,” 13-year-old Sunita Tamang tells IPS, hugging her best friend – 12-year-old Manju Tamang.

The girls hail from the remote Ghumarchowk village of Shankarpur municipality, 80 km from the centre of Kathmandu city. Both of their families lost their homes, cattle and food stocks in the quake.

Their school remains dilapidated and though they are desperate to resume their classes, they must patiently wait out the month-long government-declared closure of schools in case of further natural calamities.

In this village, which is only accessible after a steep, three-hour uphill trek, most of the 500 homes remain unsafe for residence, a major obstacle for families who are getting tired of sleeping under the stars in their potato and squash farms where they are living in makeshift tents, nothing but thin plastic sheets covering their heads.

This village in Nepal’s Kavre district was one of the worst casualties of the Apr. 25 earthquake that devastated great swathes of this South Asia nation. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

The torrential rainfall that is lashing this village makes life in agricultural fields difficult, as the ground becomes too muddy to sleep on.

“I would rather return home and take the risk,” a social worker named Bikash Tamang from the Scout Community Group tells IPS.

The National Society for Earthquake Technology-Nepal (NSET), which aims to create “earthquake safe communities in Nepal by 2020”, has begun a series of assessments of major offices and residential areas across the country.

Chief of communications for the NSET tells IPS in Kathmandu that the organisation is assessing the extent of the damage, to ensure that key service providing agencies within the government, as well as the medical and communications sector, can access those most in need.

But the destruction is so extensive that an exhaustive assessment will take time.

Residents of affected areas are receiving sporadic assistance from local Nepali engineers, who have been volunteering their services to assess damages and safety issues in neighborhoods across the country.

“These engineers are helping us free of charge, and I am so grateful to them,” Shankar Biswakarma, hailing from Bagdol ward in Kathmandu, tells IPS.

But these charitable efforts will not be enough.

Migrant families remain in limbo

The number of residents in Tundikhel, the largest camp area for the displaced in Kathmandu, has halved over the last few days. The remaining families are largely migrant workers, a 25-year-old mother of two children tells IPS.

“Many have left who have relatives and friends to help,” says young Manisha Lama. “Those who come from outside Kathmandu are the ones left here in the camps.”

Her home is in the remote village of Deupur in Kavre district, which is among the most affected districts, nearly 100 km south of the capital.

Kavre also has a record number of destroyed homes – some 30,000 lost to the quake, according to NRCS records.

“The needs of the most affected families are crucial and the response is becoming a huge challenge,” NRCS Chief of Communications Dibya Paudel tells IPS.

He explains that affected people are growing extremely frustrated at the snail’s pace of the emergency response, adding that the government and its relevant agencies are inundated by requests, and under intense pressure to respond to the specific humanitarian needs of million of affected people.

As of May 2, the combined total pledged by the international community to the relief effort stood at 68 million dollars, far short of the required 415 million dollars needed for full recovery, according to estimates prepared by the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

To make matters worse, aid agencies are reporting incidents of looting of relief goods before they reach their specified destination; those on the ground say families are getting too desperate to wait for supplies to reach them through formal channels.

“We’re still waiting for relief but I heard the government and agencies are now scared to come because of the incidents of looting,” Sachen Lama, a resident of the affected village of Bajrayogini, 10 km from Kathmandu, tells IPS.

He and his fellow villagers have been asking the community to stay calm when the relief arrives, and let the aid workers do their job so that there is no obstruction in the distribution process.

“But there was looting two days ago by some local people as they were desperate, [so our] relief supplies never arrived here,” Lama says.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Nepal’s Chitwan National Park has become one of Asia's success stories in wildlife conservation. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
CHITWAN, Nepal, Apr 11 2015 (IPS)

At dusk, when the early evening sun casts its rays over the lush landscape, the Chitwan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 200 km south of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, is a place of the utmost tranquility.

As a flock of the endangered lesser adjutant stork flies over the historic Narayani River, a left bank tributary of the Ganges in India, this correspondent’s 65-year-old forest guide Jiyana Mahato asks for complete silence: this is the time of day when wild animals gather near the water. Not far away, a swamp deer takes its bath at the river’s edge.

“A lot of our success was due to our close collaboration with local communities who depend on biodiversity conservation for their livelihoods.” -- Sher Singh Thagunna, development officer for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC)
“The sight of humans drives them away,” explains Mahato, a member of the Tharu indigenous ethnic group who play a key role in supporting the government’s wildlife conservation efforts here.

“We need to return now,” he tells IPS. The evening is not a safe time for humans to be wandering around these parts, especially now that the country’s once-dwindling tiger and rhinoceros populations are on the rise.

Mahato is the ideal guide. He has been around to witness the progress that has been made since the national park was first established in 1963, providing safe haven to 56 species of mammals.

Today, Chitwan is at the forefront of Nepal’s efforts to conserve its unique biodiversity. Earlier this year, it became the first country in the world to implement a new conservation tool, created by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), known as the Conservation Assured | Tiger Standard (CA|TS).

Established to encourage effective management and monitoring of critically endangered species and their habitats, CA|TS has received endorsement from the likes of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Global Tiger Forum, who intend to deploy the tool worldwide as a means of achieving global conservation targets set out in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Experts say that the other 12 Tiger Range Countries (TRCs) should follow Nepal’s example. This South Asian nation of 27 million people had a declining tiger population – just 121 creatures – in 2009, but intense conservation efforts have yielded an increase to 198 wild tigers in 2013, according to the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan 2014-2020.

Indeed, Nepal is leading the way on numerous conservation fronts, both in the region and worldwide. With 20 protected zones covering over 34,000 square km – or 23 percent of Nepal’s total landmass – it now ranks second in Asia for the percentage of protected surface area relative to land size. Globally it ranks among the world’s top 20 nations with the highest percentage of protected land.

In just eight years, between 2002 and 2010, Nepal added over 6,000 square km to its portfolio of protected territories, which include 10 national parks, three wildlife reserves, one hunting reserve, six conservation areas and over 5,600 hectares of ‘buffer zone’ areas that surround nine of its national parks.

These steps are crucial to maintaining Nepal’s 118 unique ecosystems, as well as endangered species like the one-horned rhinoceros whose numbers have risen from 354 in 2006 to 534 in 2011 according to the CBD.

Collaboration key to conservation

Sher Singh Thagunna, development officer for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC), tells IPS, “A lot of our success was due to our close collaboration with local communities who depend on biodiversity conservation for their livelihoods.”

Nepal has classified over 34,000 square km – roughly 23 percent of its landmass – into a range of protected areas. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

Those like Mahato, for whom conservation is not an option but a way of life, have partnered with the government on a range of initiatives including efforts to prevent poaching. Some 3,500 youths from local communities have been enlisted in anti-poaching activities throughout the national parks, tasked with patrolling tens of thousands of square km.

Collaborative conservation has taken major strides in the last decade. In 2006, the government passed over management of the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area in eastern Nepal to a local management council, marking the first time a protected area has been placed in the hands of a local committee.

According to Nepal’s latest national biodiversity strategy, by 2012 all of the country’s declared buffer zones, which cover 27 districts and 83 village development committees (VDCs), were being collectively managed by about 700,000 local people organised into 143 ‘buffer zone user committees’ and 4,088 ‘buffer zone user groups’.

Other initiatives, like the implementation of community forestry programmes – which as of 2013 “involved 18,133 forest user groups representing 2.2 million households managing 1.7 million hectares of forestland”, according to the study – have helped turn the tide on deforestation and promote the sustainable use of forest resources by locals.

Since 2004 the department of forests has created 20 collaborative forests spread out over 56,000 hectares in 10 districts of the Terai, a rich belt of marshes and grasslands located on the outer foothills of the Himalayas.

In addition, a leasehold forestry programme rolled out in 39 districts has combined conservation with poverty alleviation, providing a livelihood to over 7,400 poor households by involving them in the sustainable management and harvesting of selected forest-related products, while simultaneously protecting over 42,000 hectares of forested land.

Forest loss and degradation is a major concern for the government, with a 2014 country report to the CBD noting that 55 species of mammals and 149 species of birds – as well as numerous plant varieties – are under threat.

Given that Nepal is home to 3.2 percent of the world’s flora, these trends are worrying, but if the government keeps up its track record of looping locals into conservation efforts, it will soon be able to reverse any negative trends.

Of course, none of these efforts on the ground would be possible without the right attitude at the “top”, experts say.

“There is a high [degree] of political commitment at the top government level,” Ghanashyam Gurung, senior conservation programme director for WWF-Nepal, tells IPS. This, in turn, has created a strong mechanism to curb the menace of poaching.

With security forces now actively involved in the fight against poaching, Nepal is bucking the global trend, defying a powerful, 213-billion-dollar annual industry by going two years without a single reported incident of poaching, DPNWC officials say.

Although other threats remain – including burning issues like an increasing population that suggests an urgent need for better urban planning, as well as the country’s vulnerability to natural disasters like glacial lake outburst floods and landslides that spell danger for its mountain ecosystems – Nepal is blazing a trail that other nations would do well to follow.

“Conservation is a long process and Nepal’s efforts have shown that good planning works […],” Janita Gurung, biodiversity conservation and management specialist for the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) tells IPS.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Rashmi Hamal is a local heroine who helped to save her friend from an early marriage. She campaigns actively against child marriages in the Far Western Region of Nepal. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
BAJURA, Nepal, Mar 4 2015 (IPS)

If not for a group of her school friends coming to her rescue, Shradha Nepali would have become a bride at the tender age of 14.

Hailing from the remote village of Pinalekh in the Bajura District of Nepal’s Far-Western Region, 900 km from the capital, Kathmandu, the teenager was a likely candidate for child marriage.

“We are not afraid anymore because a majority of our community members now want to fight against child marriages." -- 16-year-old Rashmi Hamal, president of the all-girls Jyalpa Child Club in Far-West Nepal
Her family of six survive on an income of less than a dollar a day – subsisting largely off the produce grown on their tiny farm and scraping together a few extra coins working as underpaid daily labourers.

Mahesh Joshi, coordinator of the local non-governmental organisation PeaceWin, tells IPS that such abject poverty is one of the primary drivers of early marriage in Nepal, a choice taken by many adolescent girls with few prospects beyond a lifetime of hard work, and hunger.

Nepali herself tells IPS she was “unaware of the consequences” of her decision at the time.

Had her friends not intervened, she would have joined the already swollen ranks of Nepal’s child brides – according to a 2013 study by Plan Asia and the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), 41 percent of Nepali women between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before the legal age of 18.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has classified Nepal as one of the world’s top 10 countries with the highest rates of child marriage. But now, thanks to an all-girls-led initiative around the country, the tide may be about to turn.

Poverty turning kids into brides

South Asia is home to an estimated 42 percent of the world’s child brides, with Nepal ranked third – behind Bangladesh and India – according to a study by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

A myriad of causes fuels child marriage in Nepal, home to an estimated 27.8 million people, of whom 24 percent live below the poverty line, says the World Bank.

Nepal’s National Women’s Commission believes economic, social and religious factors all play a role. In the country’s southern Tarai belt, for instance, continuation of the dowry system keeps the practice of child marriage alive. The younger the girl, the less her parents are expected to pay the groom, forcing many to part with their daughters at an ever-younger age.

Others simply choose to marry off their daughters so they have one less mouth to feed.

And while girls’ education is gaining more importance, it is still not considered a priority among rural, impoverished communities – UNICEF says the basic literacy rate among women aged 15-24 is 77.5 percent, a number that falls to 66 percent for secondary school enrolment.

Early marriages have been recognised, internationally and domestically in Nepal, as a violation of girls’ basic human rights, and a practice that has hugely negative repercussions across the board.

“Young girls who are underage when they marry are likely to suffer from a series of health and psychological problems,” explains UNFPA Nepal Deputy Representative Kristine Blokhus.

“There is a real risk of death during delivery, and even if a young girl survives, she may face life-long health problems,” the official tells IPS.

Child marriage severely limits a girl’s future prospects, often sealing her access to labour markets and condemning her to a lifetime of dependence on her husband or his family.

Experts say this is the beginning of a cycle of disempowerment, wherein a girl with few choices becomes trapped in a situation where limited options dwindle ever further.

By girls, for girls: A grassroots approach

When initiatives to fight against the practice gain ground, it is cause for celebration among activists, policy-makers, and families who opt for child marriage as a last resort in the face of extreme hardship.

Shradha Nepali nearly became a bride at the age of 14. She was saved by an intervention from a local all-girls club that fights against child marriages. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

The district of Bajura, where Shradha Nepali and her friends live, is leading the way on these efforts, with communities across the district competing to declare their respective villages ‘child marriage-free zones’: a bold statement against an age-old practice.

Bajura is located in the Far-Western Region of Nepal, home to some of the country’s most remote and developmentally challenged villages; incomes here are low and child marriages are correspondingly high.

Changing attitudes here is not easy, but that hasn’t stopped girls like 16-year-old Rashmi Hamal, president of the Jyalpa Child Club in the remote Badi Mallika Municipality, from trying.

“We are not afraid anymore because a majority of our community members now want to fight against child marriages,” Hamal tells IPS.

She is one of 10 girls who came together in 2014 with the help of PeaceWin and a youth-led agency called Restless Development, with support from UNICEF, to strategise on how best to stem the practice once and for all.

“These girls are local heroes; they have really proven themselves [in their] persistent educational campaigns, and by inspiring their parents to join their cause,” says Hira Karki, a local social mobiliser from PeaceWin.

It was this club that rescued Nepali from her marriage, shortly after she ran away from home. Although the girl’s mother doesn’t fault her for wanting to flee, she is visibly relieved to have her daughter back, and determined to make her stay.

“I cannot blame her [for running away] because she wanted to escape hardship at home. I [now] hope to support her in every way possible,” the 35-year-old mother tells IPS.

Today, Nepali is one of the club’s most active campaigners against child brides. Their success is tangible: over 84 schools in Bajura and the neighbouring districts of Kalikot, Accham and Mugu have launched similar initiatives in the last year.

“The best part of anti-child marriage activism here is that we have campaigners from our own community who live here and get the chance to educate their own adult members without antagonising them,” a local school principal, Jahar Sing Thapa, tells IPS.

Though small, each club is contributing to the country’s overall efforts to stem the practice. In the past five years, UNFPA says the rate of child marriage has declined by 20 percent.

Beyond activism: towards a policy of ‘zero prevalence’

While independent, local efforts are praiseworthy, they alone will not be adequate to tackle the problem at a national scale.

“We have learnt from our own experience that simply raising awareness against underage marriages is not enough,” UNICEF Nepal’s Deputy Representative Rownak Khan tells IPS in Kathmandu, adding that a multi-sector approach involving financial literacy, life-skills training and income-generation support for adolescent girls will all need to become part of the country’s arsenal against early marriages.

All these services are now core components of the government’s national level ‘Adolescent Development Program’, initiated in 1998.

Kiran Rupakhetee, chief of the government’s Child Protection Section, tells IPS that a variety of government ministries are now working together, resulting in the drafting of the government’s first national strategy document against child marriage.

Combined with some 20,000 child-run clubs across the country, this multi-pronged approach promises to bring real changes across the country, and move Nepal closer to the day when it can call child marriage a thing of the past.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Relief workers and aid agencies are worried about the security, protection and psychological health of women and children in post-disaster settings. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
DABI, Nepal, Aug 27 2014 (IPS)

Living in a makeshift tarpaulin shelter, which barely protects her family from the torrential rainfall or scorching heat of this remote village in southern Nepal, 36-year-old Kamala Pari is under immense stress, worrying about her financial security and children’s safety.

The family’s only house and tiny plot of farmland were completely destroyed by the massive landslide on Jul. 2 that struck the village of Dabi, part of the Dhusun Village Development Committee (VDC) of Sindhupalchok district, nearly 100 km south of the capital Kathmandu.

Dhusun was one of the four VDCs including Mankha, Tekanpur and Ramche severely affected by the disaster, which killed 156 and displaced 478 persons, according to the ministry of home affairs.

This was Nepal’s worst landslide in terms of human fatalities, according to the Nepal Red Cross Society, the country’s largest disaster relief NGO.

“My students are too scared to return to their classrooms. They really need a lot of counseling." -- Krishna Bhakta Nepal, principal of Jalpa High School
Though the government is still assessing long-term damages from that fateful day, officials here tell IPS the worst victims are likely to be women and children from these impoverished rural areas, whose houses and farms are erected on land that is highly vulnerable to natural catastrophes.

Left homeless and further impoverished, Pari is worried about the toll this will take on her children, who are now living with the reality of having lost their home and many of their friends.

“We’re not just living in fear of another disaster but have to worry about our future as there is nothing left for us to survive on,” Pari told IPS, adding that their monthly income fell from 100 dollars to 50 dollars after the landslide.

Her 50 neighbours, living in tarpaulin tents in a makeshift camp on top of a hill in this remote village, are also preparing for hard times ahead.

“We lost everything and now we run this shop to survive,” 15-year-old Elina Shrestha, a displaced teenager, told IPS, gesturing at the small grocery shop that she and her friends have cobbled together.

Their customers include tourists from Kathmandu and nearby towns who are flocking to destroyed villages to see with their own eyes the landslide-scarred hills and the lake created by the overflow of water from the nearby Sunkoshi river.

Protecting the vulnerable

Relief workers and protection specialists from government and aid agencies told IPS they are worried about the security, protection and psychological health of women and children.

An estimated 50 children were killed in the landslide, according to the ministry of women, children and social welfare.

“In any disaster, children and women seem to be more impacted than others,” Sunita Kayastha, chief of the emergency unit of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) told IPS, adding that they are most vulnerable to abuse and violence.

Women and children are 14 times more likely than men to die in a disaster, according to a report by Plan International, which found adolescent girls to be particularly vulnerable to sexual violence in the aftermath of a natural hazard.

Senior psychosocial experts recently visited the affected areas and specifically reported that children and women were under immense psychological stress.

“The children need a lot of counseling [and] healing them is our top priority right now,” Women Development Officer Anju Dhungana, point-person for affected women and children in the Sindhupalchok district, told IPS.

Dhungana is concerned about the gap in professional psychosocial counseling at the local level and has requested help from government and international aid agencies based in Kathmandu.

Schools are gradually being resumed, with the help of aid agencies who are identifying safe locations for the children whose classrooms have been destroyed.

One school was totally destroyed, killing 33 children, and the remaining 142 children are now studying in temporary learning centres built by Save the Children and the District Education Office, officials told IPS.

A further 1,952 children who attend schools built close to the river are also at risk, experts say.

Trauma is quite widespread, the sight of the hollowed-out mountainside and large dam created close to the river still causing panic among children and their parents, as well as their teachers.

“I lost 28 of my students and now I have [the] job of healing hundreds of their school friends,” Balaram Timilsina, principal of Bansagu School in Mankha VDC, told IPS.

“My students are too scared to return to their classrooms. They really need a lot of counseling,” added Krishna Bhakta Nepal, principal of Jalpa High School of Khadichaur, a small town near Mankha.

International agencies Save the Children, UNICEF and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) are helping the government’s efforts to restore normal life in the villages, but it has been challenging.

“We need to help children get back to school by ensuring a safe environment for them,” Sudarshan Shrestha, communications director of Save the Children, told IPS.

The international NGO has been setting up temporary learning centres for hundreds of students who lost their schools.

High risk for adolescent girls

Shrestha’s concern is not just for the children but also the young women who are often vulnerable in post-disaster situations to sexual violence and trafficking.

“The risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking is always high among the families impoverished by disaster, and during such situations, girls are often hoaxed and tricked by traffickers,” explained Shrestha.

Sindhupalchok, one of Nepal’s most impoverished districts, is notorious for being a source of young girls who are trafficked to Kathmandu and Indian cities, according to NGOs; a recent report by Child Reach International identified the district as a major trafficking centre.

“Whenever disaster strikes, the protection of adolescent girls should be highly prioritised and our role is to make sure this crucial issue is included in the disaster response,” UNFPA’s country representative Guilia Vallese told IPS, explaining that protection agencies need to be highly vigilant.

Government officials said that although there have been no cases of sexual or domestic violence and trafficking, they remain concerned.

“There are also a lot of young girls displaced [and living] with their relatives and after our assessment, we found that they need more protection,” explained officer Dhungana.

She said that many of them live in the camps or in school buildings in villages that are remote, with little or no government presence.

The government has formed a committee on protection measures and will be assessing the situation of vulnerability soon to ensure that children and women are living in a secure environment.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A poor Muslim family in the Habrahawa village of the Banke district in west Nepal has little means of recovering from natural disasters. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
BANKE, Nepal, Aug 11 2014 (IPS)

Barely 100 km north of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, the settlement of Jure, which forms part of the village of Mankha, has become a tragic example of how the country’s poorest rural communities are the first and worst victims of natural disasters.

Barely a week ago, on Aug. 2, a slope of land nearly two km long located roughly 1,350 metres above the Sunkoshi river collapsed, sweeping away over 100 households and killing some 155 people in this tiny settlement with a population of just 2,000 people.

“The majority of natural disaster victims have always been [from] the poorest communities and the tragic incident in Jure is an unfortunate reminder of that fact." -- Pitamber Aryal, national programme manager of the U.N.’s Comprehensive Disaster Risk Management Programme in Nepal
According to the Nepal Red Cross Society (NRCS), the country’s largest humanitarian agency, the death toll from last week’s disaster ranks among the worst in the history of this catastrophe-prone South Asian nation.

With so many dead, and fears rising that the artificial lake – created by blockages to the river – may burst and flood surrounding villages, experts are urging the government to seriously consider mapping out hazard areas across the country and integrate the management of natural disasters into its national economic and development plans.

Such a move could mean the difference between life and death for Nepal’s low-income communities, who are often forced to live in the most vulnerable areas.

When disasters strike, these groups are left homeless and injured, stripped of the small plots of agricultural land on which they subsist.

Poorest suffer worst impacts

Steep slopes, active seismic zones, savage monsoon rains between July and September and mountainous topography make Nepal a hotbed of disasters, according to the World Bank.

Over 80 percent of the country’s 27.8 million people live in rural areas, with a quarter of the population languishing below the poverty line of 1.25 dollars a day.

The poorest of the poor, who largely rely on agriculture, typically live on steep slopes under the constant shadow of landslides, or in low-lying flood-prone areas, and have virtually no resources with which to bounce back after a weather-related calamity, says the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

“In many cases, communities that live in high-risk areas tend to have higher levels of poverty and as a result, do not have the ability to relocate to safer areas,” Moira Reddick, coordinator of the Nepal Risk Reduction Consortium (NRRC), told IPS.

Most homes are abandoned in the flood-prone Holiya village in Nepal but poor families often return to them in the aftermath of natural disasters. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

The NRRC, a collaborative body of local and international humanitarian and development aid agencies acting in partnership with the Nepal government, have long advocated for disaster risk reduction (DRR) to be incorporated into the state’s poverty reduction strategies in order to better provide for vulnerable communities and “minimise the impact of disasters” Reddick added.

“The majority of natural disaster victims have always been [from] the poorest communities and the tragic incident in Jure is an unfortunate reminder of that fact,” Pitamber Aryal, national programme manager of the U.N.’s Comprehensive Disaster Risk Management Programme in Nepal, told IPS.

In the last three decades, landslides have resulted in 4,511 fatalities and flattened 18,414 houses, affecting 555,000 people, according to official data.

Forced to take risks

Dinanath Sharma, DRR coordinator for the international NGO Practical Action, told IPS that his organisation has made several attempts to move communities to safer locations, but their efforts are thwarted by the lack of a comprehensive relocation plan that offers both secure residence and economic viability.

“We will not move anywhere unless the government finds us a place that is fertile and good for our livelihoods,” a Muslim farmer from the remote Habrahawa villagein the Banke district, 600 km southwest of the capital, told IPS.

This simple demand is heard often throughout Nepal’s numerous villages, particularly in those that sit on the banks of the Rapti River, one of the largest in the country that has been the source of major flooding over the past decade.

Although floods have affected over 3.6 million people in the last decade alone, according to the government’s National Disaster Report for 2013, villagers continue to return to their ancestral homes where they at least have access to fertile land and water, which enables them to eke out a living.

“Where can we go really? How can we abandon our homes here and go to a new place where there is no fertile land?” Chitan Khan, a farmer from the Khalemasaha village, also in the Banke district, told IPS.

Several families told IPS they sometimes temporarily relocate to villages far from the river during the monsoon season, but always return when the rain subsides. Khan is already stockpiling food in a safer place, but he is resigned to the fact that the annual floods will wash away half his food stores in the village.

According to the ministry of home affairs, floods and landslide cause 300 deaths and economic damages of about three million dollars annually – adding to an already precarious situation in Nepal, where an estimated 3.5 million people are food insecure, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

History repeats itself

For those familiar with Nepal’s vulnerabilities, the government’s unwillingness to establish comprehensive DRR programmes is nothing short of baffling.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), for instance, has been studying and analysing the fragile mountain ecosystem across the Himalayas in Asia’s central, south and eastern regions for the last 30 years.

One of its observations included the Sunkoshi Valley’s vulnerability to water-induced hazards due to a weak geological formation and steep topography, made worse by frequent and heavy rainfall.

The lack of an appropriate monitoring and early-warning system, however, resulted in a tragedy on Aug. 2 that could easily have been avoided, experts say.

In response, the government has created a high-level committee to seek solutions for longer-term disaster preparedness, said officials.

“There is definitely serious discussion now on how to reduce vulnerability of [poor] communities and the only way to do that is to relocate them with a comprehensive economic programme,” Rishi Ram Sharma, director general of the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), told IPS.

To ensure the safety of villagers, the government must create intensive geological studies to map the dangerous areas, which could also help to also identify the safest places to relocate whole villages, explained Sharma, who now heads the newly created disaster preparedness committee.

Local aid workers told IPS the government’s emergency response, coordinated through the army and police force under the supervision of the home ministry, was efficient but that rescue workers faced challenges in reaching remote villages due to a combination of difficult terrain and heavy rainfall.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Girls from Nepal’s Dalit community must clear numerous hurdles before they can enjoy a decent education. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Jul 23 2014 (IPS)

With over 41 percent of Nepal’s three million Dalits living below the poverty line, and over 90 percent classified as ‘landless’, the country must reassess its progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) vis-a-vis its most vulnerable populations.

Hundreds of thousands of harvesters flock to high-altitude pastures in Nepal to gather a fungus known as ‘Himalayan Viagra’. Credit: Uttam Babu Shrestha

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Jun 27 2014 (IPS)

Intense competition during harvest season for a fungus dubbed ‘Himalayan Viagra’ – coveted for its legendary aphrodisiac qualities – has sparked violence in Nepal’s remote western mountains, causing concern among security officials here about the safety of more than 100,000 harvesters.

“The violence has already begun even at the initial stage of the harvest, and we can expect more,” Nepal Police Divisional Inspector General Kesh Bahadur Shahi, head of the Midwestern Development Region headquarters in Surkhet District, 600 km west of the capital Kathmandu, told IPS.

Earlier this month a harvester named Phurwa Tshering (30) was killed in a violent tussle in the Dolpa District, northeast of Surkhet, where tens of thousands of harvesters gather each year.

A second harvester, Thundup Lama, died some days later in a Kathmandu hospital from injuries sustained in the scuffle, amid allegations of police misconduct.

Known among the scientific community as ophiocordyceps sinensis – though harvesters refer to it simply as ‘caterpillar fungus’, and Tibetan traders use the name ‘yartsa gunbu’ (meaning, literally, ‘winter worm, summer grass’) – the fungus germinates underground inside living larvae, mummifies them during the winter, and then emerges through the head of the dead caterpillar, pushing up through the soil in the form of a stalk-like mushroom.

For over 2,000 years people across the Asiatic region have sought this fungus for its healing properties, including its fabled ability to treat diseases of the kidney and lungs, as well as cure erectile dysfunction.

A harvester holds up a single piece of ‘Yartsa Gunbu’, otherwise known as ‘winter worm, summer grass.’ Credit: Uttam Babu Shrestha

Since 2001, when the Nepali government legalised harvesting of the fungus, the mountains have become the site of a veritable battle royal.

Lured by the promise of high profits harvesters flock to the Himalayas every June to participate in the two-month hunt for the prized fungus, setting up camp on the northern alpine grasslands of Nepal, Bhutan, India and the Tibetan Plateau, at altitudes of between 3,000 and 5,000 metres above sea-level.

Though each stalk measures no more than four centimeters in length, a single gram of yartsa gunbu can sell for up to 80 dollars (mostly in China), making the dangerous, high-altitude hunt more than worth it for thousands of impoverished farmers.

But because the substance is so rare and so valuable, the collection period often turns deadly. So far, no one has been held accountable for the deaths, and Nepal’s police force has denied allegations of wrongdoing.

Unsatisfied with officials’ assurances, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recently deployed an investigation team to the Dolpa district, which borders Tibet.

“Our team has headed for field investigations to the site where the incident occurred and we will also speak to the Nepal police to uncover the truth,” Bed Prasad Adhikari, secretary of the NHRC, told IPS.

“We need to wait until the investigation is concluded, and only then will NHRC reveal the truth to the public,” he added.

In 2011 a local court sentenced six men to life in prison for the murder of seven of their harvest rivals.

While Nepali security officials scramble to patrol some of the world’s roughest terrain, ecology experts warn of over-harvesting and the need for sustainable practices that could support local economies and end the cycle of violence.

Stepping up security

“There is an urgent need for sustainable harvesting practices and an equitable benefit-sharing mechanism with the local people." -- Yam Bahadur Thapa, director general of the Department of Plant Resources (DoPR) at Nepal’s ministry of forests and soil conservation
The police are expecting more violence as the season enters its third week, and have already dispatched 160 personnel attached to the Armed Police Force (APF) – a paramilitary set up during Nepal’s decade-long civil war – to patrol harvesting sites, including the northern Mugu and Dolpa districts.

“We have asked for more personnel from the Nepal police to support our security operation,” Shahi said.

Speaking to IPS in Kathmandu, Police Spokesperson and Senior Superintendent of Police Ganesh KC told IPS this is the first time armed personnel have been deployed to oversee the harvest, and they are facing challenges due to the huge radius of the harvesting zone, and the extremely difficult terrain.

The Dolpa District alone – home to 24 pastures rich in the caterpillar fungus – spans nearly 8,000 square km.

To make matters worse, commercial traders and so-called ‘cartels’ have now joined the fray.

“There is a mafia of traders from Kathmandu and other adjoining Nepali districts near the Chinese border who are involved in the scheme, and they come with huge stacks of cash and will not return empty-handed,” Shahi said. “Some traders even bring helicopters to buy as much as they can.”

From policing to long-term policies

Various studies suggest that China’s booming economy, which has fueled demand for the ‘winter worm, summer grass’, has created a global market for the fungus that touches 11 billion dollars a year.

Nepal currently meets two percent of the global demand for the precious fungus, making it the world’s second largest supplier.

But as demand outpaces supply, and a valuable natural resource is plundered away annually, tensions over access rights have been mounting.

“There is loss of social integrity among local people; there are cases of robbery and deaths as a result [of this harvest],” Yam Bahadur Thapa, director general of the Department of Plant Resources (DoPR) at Nepal’s ministry of forests and soil conservation, told IPS.

“There is an urgent need for sustainable harvesting practices and an equitable benefit-sharing mechanism with the local people,” he noted, adding that the presence of outsiders often exacerbates tensions.

Thapa said the number of harvesters has doubled since 2001, while the number of units collected per person has declined drastically, from 260 pieces of fungus per person in 2006 to less than 125 now.

In addition, he asserted, “The price difference between the local and international market is huge, leading to an inequitable share of income among the primary collectors.”

For instance, a kilogram of fungus sold for 25,000 dollars by a middleman in Nepal could sell for up to 70,000 dollars once it is shipped abroad, he said.

A DoPR draft policy for caterpillar fungus harvest management submitted in April to the prime minister’s cabinet is still awaiting approval. The policy proposes regulating trade to increase government revenue, investing in scientific research, strengthening local institutions and raising awareness among the locals.

“There is no single inch of habitat left untouched…at the end of the harvesting season,” Uttam Babu Shrestha, a research fellow at the Institute of Agriculture and the Environment at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, told IPS.

His research during the 2011 harvest season in Nepal showed that, “Virtually all harvesters (95.1 percent) believe the availability of the caterpillar fungus in the pastures to be declining, and 67 percent consider current harvesting practices to be unsustainable.”

Shrestha found per capita harvesting to be higher in Nepal than in other countries, which adds to the tension. “Nepal’s harvesters and traders are doing business in a fearful environment,” he said, echoing the concerns of law enforcement officials.

Better central regulation would not only enhance sustainability and security, but would also increase government revenue, experts say.

The official royalty rate of around 10,000 Nepali rupees (about 100 dollars) per kilogram was set when Nepal legalised the harvest in 2001.

Since then, “The market price… has increased up to 2,300 percent and yet the royalty rate is the same,” Shrestha said, describing the stagnant rate as a “missed opportunity.”

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) estimates that the government of Nepal currently earns about 5.1 million rupees from the trade.

Experts say that by paying local harvesters a higher price, the government could witness a substantial increase in revenue flows.

Until the government agrees upon a comprehensive plan, the high-altitude pastures will continue to see fear, violence and destruction in pursuit of the mysterious fungus.

(END)

Many women in Nepal say they are treated as inferior citizens. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Aug 3 2013 (IPS)

Ten years after she was trafficked to an Indian circus, 22-year-old Radha has returned home stateless, with no document to prove she is a Nepali citizen. Her parents are Nepali but she married a fellow Indian circus member, and does not qualify to be a Nepali citizen any more.

Her husband died without supporting her for Indian citizenship, and now she has no proof she ever married him.

“I don’t know where I belong any more,” Radha told IPS. She is struggling to start a new life with her two young children. But without a Nepali ID it’s hard. She cannot get a job in public service or the private sector, she cannot pursue higher education or buy property, and she cannot claim any inheritance.

She cannot open a bank account, and cannot register the birth of her children, or even register their marriage eventually.

There are tens and thousands of young women like Radha in Nepal, who don’t have citizenship. Trafficked victims have particular difficulty getting citizenship, according to Shakti Samuha, an organisation set up by trafficking victims.

According to the NGO, women who are trafficked or lured to India by Nepali traffickers are usually minors, and the minimum age for applying for citizenship is 16. When they return, most are already married and have lost contact with their parents, who could confirm their credentials.

The only choice for most is to work in the most exploitative informal sector – the so-called entertainment industry, especially ‘cabin restaurants,’ dance bars, cheap motels and massage parlours which harbour prostitution.

“Most of the trafficked victims or sexually exploited young Nepali women are further victimised when they have difficulty getting citizenship,” Biswo Khadka, director of Maiti Nepal, an NGO fighting trafficking and rescuing victims, told IPS. Precise numbers are hard to come by because lack of registration means lack of accurate data.

According to a report ‘Acquisition of Citizenship Certificate in Nepal,’ by the Forum for Women, Law and Development (FWLD) published in April this year, an estimated 4.3 million people in Nepal do not have citizenship certificates, in a total population of 26.6 million. Activists say most of these are women and their children.

At the heart of the problem is the constitution. Following the end of a decade-long armed conflict in 2006 and elimination of the monarchy the same year, an interim constitution was framed in 2007 to introduce significant social reforms to end discrimination based on caste, ethnicity and gender.

The Nepal Citizenship Act 2007 states that a Nepali can acquire citizenship based on either mother or father. But the chief district officers usually ask for the father’s citizenship.

FWLD executive director Sabin Shrestha told IPS that the law also does not apply if the child’s mother was married to a foreign national.

“A Nepali woman married to a foreign national is literally stripped of her national identity, and her children become the worst victims,” said advocate Sushma Gautam. She has successfully fought many cases of citizenship for women in the Supreme Court.

Government officials say it is incomplete documentation and not the gender bias that is the problem.

“Citizenship is a crucial issue for the government and it is making efforts to help its rightful citizens,” Umesh Dhakal, chief district officer of Parbat, about 300 km northwest of Kathmandu, told IPS. He is former coordinator of the citizenship cell at the home ministry.

Dhakal said the government had organised mobile camps in remote areas all over the country from April to June this year and distributed more than 600,000 citizenship certificates.

“As long as there is complete documentation, whether from the mother’s or the father’s side, every citizen will get the citizenship,” he said.

The National Women’s Commission says the chief district officers (CDOs), who are the sole authority for issuing citizenship, should implement the law without being discriminatory in their decision.

“The CDOs need to change their attitude and be more gender-sensitive on the citizenship issue,” said Ansari.

Over 90 percent of the buildings in Kathmandu could collapse in the event of an earthquake. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Jul 12 2013 (IPS)

As the chief of building codes and earthquake safety of the Lalitpur Municipality, located about 10 km from Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, Sainik Raj Singh has the tough job of cracking down on builders who fail to comply with the government’s construction regulations.

“One can make many enemies by enforcing the codes but it is high time that we follow the rules strictly,” the official told IPS in his office in Lalitpur.

"I am afraid a major earthquake will happen and we will all look back at this time and ask why more was not done and how many lives could have been saved." -- Moira Reddick, coordinator of the Nepal Risk Reduction Consortium (NRRC).
Singh is not on a power trip – he is simply concerned about the number of unplanned buildings in Kathmandu, which has been ranked the world’s most ‘at-risk’ city for earthquakes by GeoHazards International (GHI).

Situated on top of the active Indian tectonic plate, which is constantly pushing up against the Tibetan tectonic plate, Kathmandu was found to be extremely vulnerable to seismic activity, which can cause landslides and fires as well as quakes.

While the city’s 1.5 million residents are on red alert, the city itself is unprepared for what experts believe is an inevitable disaster: the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET) estimates that over 90 percent of existing buildings in Kathmandu and other cities in Nepal are non-engineered.

Over 3,000 non-engineered houses are added every year in the capital, according to the Nepal Risk Reduction Consortium (NRRC), a body comprised of government agencies, donors, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and representatives of the United Nations.

An earthquake measuring a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter could kill 100,000, injure 300,00 people and displace over a million within seconds, unless disaster preparedness measures are immediately identified and implemented.

Nepal’s National Building Code was introduced in 1994 in the aftermath of the 1988 earthquake that killed 721 people in east Nepal and destroyed a large number of buildings that were not earthquake resistant.

Nearly 25 years later, implementation is gradually becoming a reality, with the government actively supporting municipalities in their efforts to regulate construction, said Singh.

He believes the first step is to ensure that residential, school and commercial buildings can withstand an earthquake of any size and scale.

Learning from Haiti

The 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti in 2010, killing 200,000, displacing 1.5 million and destroying 70 percent of all buildings including 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings, was a major wake-up call for this South Asian country of 30.9 million people.

Many of the buildings that crumbled in Haiti, like those in Nepal, were built without the input of an architect or engineer.

In Nepal, the primary concern is for schools and the safety of children. There are an estimated 82,170 buildings in 33,160 public schools in Nepal, of which 50 percent need to be reconstructed, according to NSET.

Over 2,000 schools are situated in Kathmandu alone, but due to lax imposition of building regulations, 60 percent of them are sitting ducks for the fallout from quakes, which would endanger the lives of 100,000 students.

A recent NSET engineering investigation concluded that the frailty of buildings was due to the use of traditional materials such as adobe, stone rubble in mud mortar or brick in mud mortar, as well as poor maintenance and flimsy roofs.

A school child in Kathmandu is 400 times more likely to die in an earthquake than a school child in Kobe, Japan, another earthquake prone city and site of the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, according to GHI.

“We need to start retrofitting all the school buildings for the safety of school children who will be most at risk during an earthquake,” Hima Shrestha, senior structural engineer of NSET, told IPS.

This summer, NSET, with the help of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), began retrofitting 50 of the most earthquake vulnerable public schools.

The entire process, which involves trained masons adding supportive iron rods and pillars between floors, strengthening the foundations and reworking walls and flooring, can take months, and will likely only be completed by the end of the year.

NSET is now conducting a rapid assessment on the status of schools and the 125 major hospitals spread around Nepal with assistance from the World Bank, in the hopes of retrofitting as many buildings as possible.

Government efforts

According to the ministry of home affairs, this past year has seen better preparedness than previous years.

“The government is very serious about preparedness and there is now action on the ground,” said Pradeep Koirala, under-secretary of the home affairs ministry and senior official of the disaster management section.

Koirala’s office is taking the lead in national disaster preparedness through a newly established 24-hour National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC), which plans to open similar centres in all of Nepal’s 75 districts.

The NEOC will be the first point of contact during emergencies, capable of coordinating domestic and international humanitarian aid and dispatching disaster relief supplies. It is also equipped with early warning systems, and will disseminate alerts to local government offices.

“We have seen an incredible increase in leadership, commitment and confidence from the government in strengthening preparedness at the national and community level,” says Moira Reddick, coordinator of the NRRC.

Today, the NRRC is tasked with implementing the National Strategy for Disaster Risk Management, a five-year initiative that began in 2011 armed with a budget of 195.8 million dollars, whose top priorities are ensuring school and hospital safety by retrofitting buildings, conducting emergency drills and training staff to respond to a crisis.

A national simulation planned for Jun. 20 to test the efficacy of emergency responders was cancelled when floods and landslides struck west Nepal on Jun. 16, killing over 16 people and leaving 875 families displaced, according to the U.N.

Another national simulation, this one led by the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) and the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN), with support from the U.S. government, is scheduled for September, with the aim of testing the preparedness of the army, police units, hospitals and airports.

The main challenge now is overcoming a severe shortage of donors, experts say.

“Obtaining the necessary resources has been difficult,” Moira said, adding that school and hospital safety alone requires 57 million dollars.

She also highlighted some pressing “institutional blockages”, including the lack of a formal Disaster Management Act outlining the government’s policy on how to strengthen preparedness.

“Without overcoming these blockages and without continued support… from donors, I am afraid a major earthquake will happen and we will all look back at this time and ask why more was not done and how many lives could have been saved,” she concluded.

Women in Nepal's remote village development communities do both housework and farm labour. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
JHIRUBAS, Nepal, Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

Over 40 percent of Nepal is covered in thick forest, but most of it has been degraded. Rural communities that have traditionally relied on the forests for survival now live in abject poverty, struggling to secure the food necessary for survival. Most men have migrated to the Gulf in search of employment.

A Leasehold Forestry and Livestock Programme (LFLP) launched by the government in 2005, with assistance from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), is achieving the twin goals of restoring wasted forest land and providing rural communities with enough income to purchase food during the nine months of the year when farming on the rocky mountain slopes of Nepal bears no fruits.

And slowly but surely, men are trickling back into their communities to help women with the backbreaking work of harvesting broom grass for sale, fodder and fuel.

Leasehold Forestry Brings a New Lease on Life from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

(END)

Women farmers are taking the lead in managing leasehold forestry programmes in rural Nepal. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
JHIRUBAS, Nepal, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Nearly 300 km from Nepal’s teeming capital, Kathmandu, in a small village dug into the steep slopes of the mountainous Palpa district, 35-year-old Dhanmaya Pata goes about her daily chores in much the same way that her ancestors did centuries ago.

Pata and the roughly 200 other residents in the scenic yet sparse Dharkesingh village, part of the Jhirubas village development committee (VDC), live off the surrounding forests, in bright red, thatched-roof mud huts.

Jhirubas is the most remote of the 3,913 VDCs scattered across 75 districts in Nepal, but it shares with its counterparts a high level of underdevelopment, food insecurity and poverty.

The road infrastructure is very weak and often gets washed away in the monsoon rains, making transportation of food very difficult – in fact, over half the population suffers from inadequate food consumption. The nearest water source is a three-hour walk away.

These villagers have no illusions of living in grand circumstances; their humble dreams consist only of ensuring a decent future for their children. And with the help of a massive leasehold forestry programme, they are doing just that.

Great swathes of the forests that cover 40 percent of Nepal’s territory have been degraded, prompting the government to embark on a project in collaboration with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to convert wasted land into economic opportunities, officials at the Department of Forests (DoF) told IPS in the capital.

In 2005, a 12.7-million-dollar Leasehold Forestry and Livestock Programme (LFLP) took flight in 22 mid-hill districts, stretching from the country’s easternmost extremity to its western border, covering 28,000 hectares of forest land managed by nearly 6,000 forestry leasehold groups involving 58,000 households.

Four years later the government began pilot projects – led by the DoF, with technical inputs from the FAO and financial assistance from IFAD – in five districts including Jhirubas, where locals have converted degraded forest areas into the country’s largest broom grass plantations.

Locally known as ‘amresu’, the grass now covers 246 hectares of the 350-hectare region. The grass requires little water and thrives on steep slopes, preventing landslides and helping to remediate the soil.

By turning the flowers of the plant into traditional brooms, which are then sold to a local retailer, villagers earn the money required to stock up on food for the monsoon months when the roads in their landslide-prone village become impassable.

“In the last 12 months we earned about 3.5 million rupees (roughly 37,000 dollars) and the income is growing every year,” Navindra Thapa Magar, a local farmer and secretary of a leasehold forestry cooperative in the Kauledanda village of the Jhirubas VDC told IPS.

Each of the 246 households in the village earned about 150 dollars in 2012, income that has proved to be indispensable in supplementing villagers’ diets during the nine months out of the year when production of maize, wheat, potatoes, millet and green vegetables comes to a standstill.

Amresu leaves also provide fodder for livestock, and the stems provide fuel.

Women run the show

Households surviving on less than 80 dollars per year quickly stood out as the target population for the project, which promised each family a 40-year free lease of one hectare of land.

DoF and FAO officials provided support by training farmers and initiating a shift away from slash-and-burn practices, known locally as ‘khoriya farming’, towards more sustainable agro-forestry techniques, in which crops are interspersed with trees and other plants, ensuring a longer and healthier life for the entire ecosystem.

What officials had not anticipated, however, was the level of women’s participation in the project.

A wave of male migration out of Jhirubas over the last few decades had pushed women into the dual role of labourer-housekeeper.

Daman Singh Thapa, chairman of the Kaule leasehold forestry cooperative, told IPS that when the scheme spread to their remote village, women quickly took up the challenge of planting and harvesting the grass, working long hours on the steep slopes.

DoF Official Govinda Prasad Kafley added that every participating household now involves equal numbers of trained men and women, who share decision-making power.

While FAO experts say income generation has led to developments like the installation of water pipes, which relieve women of having to walk several kilometres each day in search of water, others worry that the burden of farming and business operations heaped on top of household chores and care of livestock might end up hurting rather than helping the community.

Forty-year-old Bom Bahadur Thapa told IPS that the work, which includes hand-clearing shrubs in order to plant the grass, and then hand-picking the flowers for the brooms, is backbreaking.

“Let’s hope that men become more involved, instead of leaving to look for work elsewhere,” she said.

Indeed, news of the project’s success has already gone viral, prompting migrant workers to return to their village after pictures of thriving broom grass plantations and the smiling faces of their families replaced images of hardship.

Leasehold Forestry Brings a New Lease on Life from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

To reduce the drudgery of harvesting and carrying brooms on their backs to the local collection centre, several farmers in the community recently pooled their resources to purchase a tractor, becoming the first leasehold forestry group in the country to do so.

With the grass providing plenty of fodder, livestock herds have increased four-fold from roughly two to three goats to an average of 12 goats per family, said Hasti Maya Bayambu, chairperson of a leasehold forestry group in Dharkesingh. The community is even considering selling the excess fodder to markets outside their village.

Following the success of broom grass plantations, impoverished families from the traditionally marginalised janjatis (indigenous) and dalit (low caste) groups have also embarked on commercial ventures, producing cardamom and ginger using agro-forestry techniques, according to Palpa District Forest Officer Suresh Singh.

But even while celebrating the project’s success, government officials are gearing up for the next big challenge: what to do when aid from the FAO and IFAD expires at the end of 2013, leaving farmers without technical inputs like free seeds, savings schemes and marketing trainings that are integral to the proper functioning of the micro-economy that has developed around the programme.

Narayan Bhattarai, the hub officer and key field officer of the pilot districts, told IPS that farmers rely greatly on the presence of fulltime field officers, who, in addition to arranging trips for officials and donor representatives, boost locals’ confidence in the project.

By the farmers’ own admission, it will take at least five years to attain full self-sufficiency. Unless donor agencies step up their efforts, the future of one of Nepal’s most successful rural development programmes hangs in the balance.

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Dec 16 2012 (IPS)

Currently classified as one of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Nepal has one of the highest malnutrition rates globally, with over 41 percent of children suffering from chronic under-nourishment, particularly in rural areas.

As part of its efforts to support the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the LDCs, the European Union has pledged millions to help eradicate malnutrition, which is widely acknowledged to be a major hurdle to development.

Last year, the EU funneled 20 million euros into a UNICEF programme designed to tackle the problem in five Asian countries.

Of this, 3.2 million euros went directly to Nepal “to support a comprehensive package of measures to prevent and address malnutrition in the country where … approximately 1.7 million children, or nearly half of all children aged under-five in the country, are stunted or suffer from chronic malnutrition”, according to an EU-UNICEF press release.

A year later, the crisis is still severe and development experts fear the country will not meet the MDG target of reducing child mortality by two thirds by 2015.

Kathmandu’s dense population of 1.5 million people is highly vulnerable to earthquakes. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Nov 23 2012 (IPS)

Nepal now ranks 11^th on a list of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, yet it remains one of the least disaster-prepared nations globally.

Two major earthquakes in the last two years, one on Sep. 18, 2011 and the other on Oct. 5 of this year, have failed to spur the government into action.

Seismologists have warned that another big earthquake is imminent and disaster experts claim that the population of 30 million will grow more vulnerable on a daily basis unless authorities “wake up” to the dangers posed by such catastrophes.

“In our current situation, the consequences of (a) disaster will be out of control and unmanageable. We have to move fast,” Ganesh Kumar Jimee, disaster preparedness manager of the National Society for Earthquake Technology-Nepal (NSET), told IPS.

Experts are particularly concerned about the 1.5 million residents of Kathmandu city, an earthquake epicenter in which most school buildings, hospitals and government offices are not earthquake resistant.

Over 90 percent of residential buildings, designed by ordinary masons with no input from professional engineers, are considered unsafe.

School buildings suffer from the same problem with an estimated 60 percent of the city’s public schools “bound to collapse”, according to the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC).

The World Health Organisation says that hospitals, too, are highly vulnerable.

According to NSET, over 60 percent of hospitals are at risk of damage in the event of an earthquake measuring anything more than 7.0 on the Richter scale. Most of the country’s 70 blood banks are not earthquake-proof.

In addition, dozens of bridges will also be impacted, thus cutting off crucial supply routes in case of an emergency.

Organisations like NSET and the Nepal Red Cross Society (NCRS) claim that 90 percent of the city’s water pipes will be damaged and 40 percent of electricity lines and electric substations will be destroyed.

Furthermore, Nepal’s many radio stations, which play a vital role in communicating disaster-related bulletins, are unlikely to withstand the impact of an earthquake.

According to IRIN news, these 350 radio stations, 36 of which are located in Kathmandu, are crucial sources of information for the country’s population, 44 percent of which is illiterate and relies on non-print media.

Disregarding all the available data on the urgency of the situation, the government has yet to take serious action on earthquake preparedness.

A lackadaisical attitude towards legislation on preparedness is a major obstacle. A Disaster Management Act has been pending for many years due to political instability in the country.

The Act would help establish a comprehensive Disaster Management Authority that will comprise a professional team of disaster experts, rescue teams, financial resources and equipment.

As of now, the only legitimate body tasked with overseeing disasters like earthquakes consists of a handful of people working in a small disaster unit under the Ministry of Home Affairs.

“Hopefully (these steps) will be taken soon and people will take this issue much more seriously from a risk reduction perspective rather than (focusing on) post-disaster activity,” Man Thapa, programme manager of the disaster risk management team for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IPS.

The UNDP is working with local municipalities and organising trainings for masons on how to construct earthquake-resistant buildings, which could “help save people’s lives”, said Thapa.

Kathmandu at risk

Kathmandu’s dense population of 1.5 million people packed into a metropolitan area of just over 50 square kilometres presents unique challenges.

The number of housing complexes has more than doubled over the last decade, further crowding the already congested city, according to experts.

Earthquakes are nothing new in Nepal, which has witnessed 16 major earthquakes since 1223. One of the most devastating quakes occurred in 1934, killing over 8,500 people in Kathmandu; another, in 1988, caused 721 deaths.

Given the current population explosion and a boom in unsafe, high-rise buildings, the scale of a similar disaster now is unimaginable.

NSET estimates that an earthquake measuring seven or eight on the Richter scale could destroy over 60 percent of the buildings, kill up to 50,000 people, injure 100,000 and render 900,000 homeless.

While awareness about the possibility of a disaster is high, very little is being done to retrofit houses, schools or even hospitals.

“People are still not paying serious attention to the information available,” Pitamber Aryal, disaster management director of the NRCS, told IPS.

When a 6.9 Richter scale earthquake occurred in northeast India on Sep. 18 last year, its impact was also felt in Kathmandu, causing widespread panic.

People began to flee the city in a chaotic manner, paying no attention to the safety tips that had been disseminated online and aired frequently through the city’s many local radios.

Fortunately, the brief earthquake took place at six in the evening, when all the offices and schools had already closed for the day.

“If it occurred during school or office hours, a lot of people would have been injured and killed as a result of the panic,” Jimee told IPS.

“That was a drill exercise for all the Kathmandu residents on how to act during a (disaster)…let’s hope they have learnt something,” he added.

(END)

Though illegal, Nepali girls are often married off in their teens. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Oct 11 2012 (IPS)

Social activists in Nepal agree that the one reason why this impoverished country will miss the gender-linked Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the United Nations is the persistence of child marriage.

Nepal’s marriage law stipulates 20 years as the legal age for marriage for both sexes, but current records at the ministry of health and population show at least 23 percent of  girls getting married off at 15 – 19 years.

“Early marriage should be stopped because it not only affects girls’ education but also their health,” Sumon Tuladhar, education specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), tells IPS.

While MDG 2 pushes for universal primary education, MDG3 seeks to promote gender equality and empower women. Child marriage works against MDG 4, that is concerned with reducing child mortality, as also MDG 5 that aims to improve maternal health.

“We certainly need to strongly lobby against early marriage, but we are hampered by a very poor monitoring system to implement the existing law,” Dibya Dawadi, deputy director-general in the department of education, told IPS.

But, for both the government as well as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with child marriage, enforcing the law is a dilemma because legal action means prosecuting the parents.

“Sticking a mother in jail is not helpful when she may have other young children with no one to feed and protect them,” Helen Sherpa from World Education, an international NGO, tells IPS.

Activists, however, believe that change should tackle the root of the problem – their economic situation, because daughters provide valuable help in the household and on the farms in the rural areas.

“Our biggest challenge is the family’s attitude towards educating their girls,” says Dawadi.

Many rural families marry off their daughters at the age of 11 – 13 because the older a girl gets the higher the dowry demand.

Kamala Chepang was married off at 13 because her parents could not afford to educate all their children.

“I see my young siblings going to school and this makes me happy,” Kamala told IPS in the remote Shaktikhor village of Chitwan district, 300 km southwest of the capital.

Thousands of young girls like Kamala, especially from the most marginalised communities like the Chepangs, are unable to continue their education due to poverty, social barriers and a lack of schools in the remote rural areas.

Although the trend of sending young daughters to their husbands’ home has changed and most of them stay with their mothers till they reach 16, their lives change drastically after marriage and they rarely return to school.

“After marriage, these girls rarely come back to school and even if they do, their performance is very poor,” says Tuladhar from UNICEF. “Early marriage negatively impacts their self confidence.”

According to UNICEF, 51 percent of Nepalese were married as children. Nepal’s 2006 demographic and health survey found that among Nepalese women in the 20 – 49 age group, 60 percent were married by the time they reached 18.

Nepal scores poorly on gender disparity. In 2011  Nepal stood 126^th out of 135 countries in the ‘Global Gender Gap’ index of the  World Economic Forum.

“Early marriage changes a girl’s life options because parents no longer want to invest in ‘someone else’s property’,” says Kaman Singh Chepang, an activist from Nepal Chepang Association, an NGO working for the Chepang community.

Dire poverty and lack of government initiatives to get girls to school are among reasons that Chepang cites for the situation of girls in Nepal, a country where more than half of a total population of  30 million people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

Chepang believes that if child marriage is to be eradicated there should be close coordination among government sectors dealing with health, education, poverty and culture and also give priority to basic schooling. “But the government is unready for any such initiative.”

In the remote villages, girls may have to walk hours to reach their classrooms, and by the time they return home they are too exhausted to do their homework. In the end, they just drop out and help their parents until they are married off.

Child marriage not only denies girls an education, it often makes them vulnerable to a cycle of discrimination, domestic violence and abuse. By being made to bear children when they have barely attained puberty, they are forced to put themselves and their babies at risk, activists say.

“Child marriage is extreme denial of children’s rights. Many girls also suffer from abusive marriages as they are married to older boys,” said Sherpa from World Education.

Maize destroyed by monsoon failure in Chitwan district. Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
CHITWAN, Nepal, Aug 6 2012 (IPS)

Farmers in this fertile central district of south Nepal are convinced that an intense drought between May and early July that destroyed their maize crops is the result of climate change. 

“Last year my farms produced over 20 quintals of maize, but this time I could barely harvest one quintal,” 60-year-old farmer Padmakanta Poudel told IPS in the remote Jutpani village of the district.

 Poudel explained that his family had taken bank a loan of over 500 dollars to invest on his maize farm. The money was spent on hiring a tractor to till the farm, the labour to sow the seeds as well as inputs such as fertilizers. 

For a poor farmer in Nepal a 500-dollar loan is substantial and repayable only at harvest time. “We lost all our money and will have to pay back our debts. I pray that my rice crops will not also be destroyed,” Poudel said. 

Padma Puri’s situation is worse. “I am only a tenant farmer, but I have to repay everything after this disaster,” says this 58-year-old female farmer who could barely produce 20 kg of maize this year and is faced with mounting debts. 

Farmers speaking with IPS in Chitwan said that they now realise that this is the climate change they have been hearing about over radio and television. 

“I had heard about climate change (Jal Wayu Paribartan in the Nepali language) but I didn’t know we would be affected by it so badly,” says Ram Chandra Chepang from the village of Shaktikhor. 

Chepang’s farms produced barely 50 kg of maize compared to three quintals last year, enabling him to buy enough food to last six months. Now he is desperately looking for a job as daily wage labourer to repay money borrowed for farm inputs from a local moneylender. 

Nepal has a history of droughts but the intensity increased this year, say government experts. They, however, are yet to make scientific measurements of the intensity.    

Evidence of climate change in Nepal is seen in temperatures rising by about one-tenth of a degree annually, receding glaciers and snow line and volatile monsoonal rains. 

While scientists are still trying to link these changes to factors such as production of greenhouse gases and deforestation, Nepal’s farmers are coping on their own with dwindling water supply, flash floods and landslides. 

Chitwan, a major producer of maize, has suffered a 70 percent loss of the crop due to late arrival of the monsoons this year, according to assessments by the government’s Agricultural Services Office (ASO) at Ratna, 300 km west of national capital Kathmandu. 

“Maize farmers have been devastated and they feel this is a direct impact of climate change, ASO’s Ganesh Shrestha told IPS. 

The ‘Crop Situation Report’ for July 2012, produced jointly by the ministry of agriculture, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and  World Food Programme had warned that the delay in monsoon, combined with insufficient pre-monsoon rainfall, would adversely affect maize and summer vegetables. 

According to the joint report, the hill and mountain belts, where rain-fed agriculture is predominant, would be hit worst. While the monsoon revived somewhat late July, it is too late to save the maize crops. 

“The situation was worrisome when we visited the rain-fed areas in the Terai (fertile southern plains)   and we saw that the maize had been completely destroyed. This was a surprisingly intensive drought,” said Navaraj Pradhan, ecosystem adaptation analyst from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu. 

ICIMOD is currently conducting a study on climate change impacts on food security in the entire Indo Gangetic plains. This region includes thickly  populated areas like India’s Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Nepal’s Terai and Bangladesh’s basin area. 

There can be two droughts in a year without causing too much damage, but when there is drought intensity that can destroy maize, even in irrigated areas, according to ICIMOD experts. 

With such unpredictability of weather patterns growing in the country, there is need now for planned adaptation. 

“Until now most farmers have been using autonomous adaptation and that is not sustainable when drought intensity is growing,” Jit Narayan Sah, technical officer and researcher from the Nepal Agricultural Research Centre (NARC), told IPS. 

Sah explained that autonomous adaptation in Nepal are short term solutions like channeling waters from nearby rivers, using composting, using green manure and indigenous methods to control pests. 

Experts believe that planned adaptation must include comprehensive research that leads to action with agricultural policy reforms and integrate that in the farming system by working closely with the farmers. 

While there is growing awareness among farmers on the effects of climate change, their coping strategy is weak. 

“There are no experts telling the farmers what to do during such situations and there are also no policies or programmes guiding them,” said a Nepali agricultural expert from an international NGO who cannot be named because he works closely with the government. 

The expert said there was a need to build awareness among farmers on “extreme-events”. Telling them the causes is not enough but they need to be given options and guidance along with an increase infrastructure such as irrigation.   

For now, farmers are trying to make do with grossly inadequate tube wells. 

“They are doing everything on their own. With natural water resources drying up, the farmers are even working with each other to build larger water storage,” says Sah. 

Climate change adaptation may take a long time to implement in Nepal given that the country is still struggling to complete a peace process since 2006 when a decade of armed civil strife ended in the country. 

“Climate change adaptation is not a top priority right now,” says Sah.

Kathmandu's entertainment joints hire minor girls. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Jul 8 2012 (IPS)

Almost unnoticed, Nepal’s burgeoning adult entertainment industry has been drawing young girls away from being trafficked across the border to the fleshpots of India’s big cities.

Rights activists are worried that the issue of internal trafficking has not received the kind of legislative attention that resulted in laws, passed in 2007, to prevent and punish trafficking of young girls across Nepal’s borders by prostitution rings.

The result, they tell IPS, is that internal trafficking for the domestic entertainment industry is dismissed as an issue of exploitation rather than being treated as the more serious crime of trafficking for prostitution.

“Trafficking is happening right here in the country and not just to Mumbai or New Delhi of India,” says education specialist Helen Sherpa from World Education’s Asia division, which is working to combat child exploitation  through awareness programmes.

Although there are no government studies on cross-border  trafficking, a 2001 report by the International Labour Organisation estimated that around 12,000 Nepalese girls were being trafficked annually to India for prostitution.

Sherpa said that young girls from impoverished families are now being lured into working in the massage parlours and sleazy ‘cabin restaurants’ of Kathmandu and other cities with false offers of respectable jobs in the big hotels.

Cabin restaurants, massage parlours and dance bars make up the core of the entertainment industry, and a large number of them are known to be fronts for prostitution rackets.

There are also lodges, ‘bhatti pasals’ (small street eateries serving alcohol), and the ‘dohori’ (Nepali folk song and music) restaurants in the urban centres and along highways that are known to solicit clients.

An estimated 6,000-7,000 girls and women currently work in cabin restaurants, 3,000-4,000 in the dance bars, about 900 in the dohori restaurants and an equal number in the massage parlours, adding up to about 15,000 girls and women in a rapidly growing industry.

In Kathmandu alone there are an estimated 11,000 to 13,000 girls and women in the entertainment business, according to ‘Trafficking and Exploitation in the Entertainment and Sex Industries in Nepal,’ a handbook prepared for decision makers by the Terres des homes Foundation (TDH) in 2010.

Many activists consider the handbook an important source of information and guidance for government agencies and leaders dealing with trafficking. But the country has a long way to go in implementing its recommendations and steps.

“Internal trafficking has not been dealt with effectively in Nepal. It has been hinted at and peripherally addressed without researched information,” expert on trafficking Nandita Baruah tells IPS.

“But it is emerging as a critical concern today,” said Baruah who heads the ‘Combating Trafficking in Persons Programme’ of the Asia Foundation in Nepal.

Baruah explains that authorities and development agencies address internal trafficking as an issue of  child sexual exploitation in the entertainment industry  rather than one of  trafficking for  prostitution.

Nationwide there are approximately 32,000 sex workers with about half of them minors under 16 years of age, according to the government’s National Centre for STD/AIDS.

Activists believe that half of these sex workers were lured by traffickers while the other half chose to enter the trade to escape desperate poverty. Many of them were as young as 12 to 14 years old when they were internally trafficked to Kathmandu, as told to IPS by sex workers who wished to remain anonymous.

“I was 13 when I arrived in Kathmandu to join a job at a hotel but I was taken straight to a massage parlour. I had never seen such a place before,” said Sita Tamang (name changed). Tamang said that the massage parlour employers treated her well, initially.

After a week, she was told what the job really entailed. “I was shocked and I cried a lot in the beginning as I was very scared and then other girls consoled me saying that it wasn’t dangerous as they had been through the same thing and they got used to it,” said Tamang.

Tamang, now 18, says she never went back home and does not want to face her poor farmer parents. When she sees very young girls being brought in,  she is reminded of her own  past and feels bad , but  is powerless to do anything about it.

“Sometimes we fight with the owners when they bring in young girls. Once I had a physical fight with an owner over a very young girl and he let her go only after I threatened to have it reported in the newspapers,” said another masseur who started work when only 14.

She called the girl’s parents in Makwanpur district, 200 km from Kathmandu, and asked them to take their daughter home. “I screamed at them at the bus stop as I was reminded of my own past,” she said.

Cases of sex workers being sensitive and strong enough to prevent the recruitment of minors are rare. The general trend in the entertainment industry is for sex work victims to turn into traffickers themselves in a self-perpetuating system.

Studies by TDH show that entertainment workers are also primary procurers of girls for the industry and are paid for it.  Often, according to TDH studies, girls and women are not allowed to leave work until they find a replacement or repay debts by providing fresh recruits from their villages.

So far, the only action taken by the government has been in the shape of  occasional raids on entertainment establishments, though anti-trafficking laws are never invoked, activists say.

A major legal loophole is that Nepal has no law against prostitution and the girls, if arrested, are booked for disturbing the peace or obscenity. Usually, they are locked up for 24 hours and fined, but quickly return to work.

The girls earn about 100 dollars per month as salaries in the entertainment joints with the owners skimming off the bulk of the profits. Yet, many prefer that to the grinding poverty of Nepal’s rural villages.

According to TDH studies, a quarter of the establishments where the girls work bring in 10,000 dollars per month while at least half make about 4,000 dollars a month – considerable sums in impoverished Nepal.

“The severity of such crimes has not been measured and this is why the supply of girls has been easy,” said Asia Foundation’s Baruah.

She added that there is a need to conceptually clarify both the difference and the overlap between sexual exploitation and trafficking and then make a case for it within the criminal justice system.

“People have to first accept that internal trafficking is happening and the government has to acknowledge that this is a huge problem that needs more focused attention,” she explained.

When Arati Chaudhary’s husband left for India to find work as a migrant labourer, the job of managing farm and family fell on her slender shoulders.

Nepal is among the world’s most climate vulnerable countries

“My family (of four children) will starve if I don’t work harder on the farms this year. I just hope that it rains well in the monsoon season (June-September),” Arati tells IPS in her village of Lamahi in the remote Dang district, 500 km west of Kathmandu.

Agricultural experts believe that failing agriculture in the western hills is exacerbating an existing trend of male migration to neighbouring India – a country that allows Nepali nationals free access and the right to work there.

“The quality of soil has gone down, there is extreme water shortage and frequent disasters like landslides, pests and crop diseases have reduced cultivable acreage,” Krishna Raj Aryal from Support Activities for Poor Producers of Nepal, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), told IPS.

While Nepal has largely recovered from the severe 2008-2009 drought, the worst in 40 years, a World Food Programme (of the United Nations) bulletin released in February said 3.33 million people in the country were still suffering from acute food insecurity.

The same bulletin warned that the situation was likely to deteriorate in Karnali and the far-western hill and mountain districts over the first quarter of the year with food stocks depleting.

According to the state-run Nepal Agricultural Research Centre,  agricultural production only meets the country’s requirements for three to eight months per year.

As food insecurity grows, more Nepali families are becoming dependent on their male members finding alternate livelihoods in India rather than stick with uncertain farming. This is particularly true of the impoverished far western districts.

With over 80 percent of Nepal’s 27 million people dependent on farming, the export of male labour means that the burden of dealing with climate change falls squarely on the women.

Arati understands that rain has been erratic over Nepal over the last few years but, being illiterate, she is not quite sure what the constant talk of global climate change is all about.

“The weather has always been hard to predict, though the monsoon rains have become noticeably scantier and more erratic,” she said.

Arati’s situation of being left to her own devices to cope with the vagaries of the weather  is no different from that of thousands of female-headed farming households in the western region.

NGO leaders like Aryal worry that, in spite of the talk in the cities about climate change, little is being done to educate rural women on how to adapt to changing weather patterns or provide tangible support.

Government officials deny that the issue is being neglected and say things will improve gradually in a country that is still finding its feet after a debilitating ten-year civil war that ended with the  abolition of the monarchy in 2008.

Nepal is yet to give itself a new constitution that is acceptable to all parties and ethnic groups. On May 27, Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai announced that parliament, elected in 2008 to write the constitution, would be disbanded and elections held in November.

“Adaptation programmes need careful planning and we are seriously working on minimising the impacts of climate change,” Deependra Bhadaur Kshetri, vice-chairman of the National Planning Commission, told IPS.

The country’s National Adaptation Plan of Action is still under process. Separately, the environment ministry is preparing a gender strategy that is expected to address the problems faced by female-headed households dependent on agriculture.

Nepal is placed among the most climate vulnerable countries in the world due to its extreme geography (climbing from 60 m to over 8,800 m above sea level) and its impoverished, natural resource dependent population.

A 2007 study on the impact of climate change in Rasuwa district by Resource Identification and Management Society (RIMS), an environmental NGO, found steady increases in temperatures in the summer and monsoon seasons between 1978 and 2007.

Analysing data for that period, RIMS found that in addition to the temperature rise the average annual rainfall had dropped by about one mm a year, with implications for agriculture in the region.

Nepal’s agriculture sector is greatly dependent on timely rainfall (only 17 percent of land is irrigated), making farming highly vulnerable to variations in rainfall patterns.

Almost 80 percent of Nepal’s annual rainfall occurs within the monsoon months of June to September when Nepal is flooded with rain while facing scarcity or drought in the other eight months of the year.

“There is little knowledge on climate change in the rural areas and we need to educate people, especially women, on what is happening,” says Gehendra Gurung, head of the disaster risk reduction and climate change programme at Practical Action, an international NGO.

Gurung says women in the remote areas are seriously disadvantaged because of low literacy rates and lack of access to information. Compared to 75 percent literacy rate among Nepali males, the female literacy rate is only 54 percent.

The last labour force survey carried out by the government and released in 2008 showed a rise in female-headed households from 14 percent to 22 percent over a decade. Experts believe that even more women are now heading households.

“The impact on the livelihoods of women is direct since, apart from household work, they are more involved in farming and livestock keeping than ever before,” says climate change expert with Practical Action, Dinanath Bhandari.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (of the United Nations), countries such as Nepal, India and Bangladesh have about 60 percent of the female workforce engaged in agriculture.

In Nepal, the gender divide is pronounced with women involved in  agricultural, pastoral, wage labour and household work, according to the 2011 U.N. Environment Programme report, ‘Women at the frontline of climate change – gender risks and hopes.’

Women in Nepal’s mountain regions carry out over 6.6 times the agricultural work than men, according to the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. 

Women are also more dependent on natural resources since they are charged with the responsibility of securing water, food and fuel for cooking and heating in rural Nepal.

“Overall there has been little focus on the gender component and this needs to be recognised first of all,” says Bhandari.

Practical Action runs an adaptation programme where farmers have replaced their rice farms with banana plantations, which are less vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather.

“Ultimately it is the government that should take the call on running adaptation and mitigation programmes,” says Gurung. “The voluntary sector is limited to pilot and demonstration projects.”

Some NGOs are already implementing adaptation projects involving large numbers of women. For example, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) project is engaged in improving agricultural production in the mountainous district of Langtang.

Here some about 100 women are involved in promoting local seed varieties and discouraging farmers from taking to hybrids which are not viable in the long term due to the constant climate change.

“We have engaged these women to run the project and train local people in adapting to extreme climatic conditions,” said Anil Manandhar, country chief of WWF-Nepal.

The women collect and preserve local seed varieties and sell them to female farmers at subsidised rates. In addition, WWF-Nepal runs a Krishak Pathsala (Farmers’ School), where irrigation and water conservation methods are taught.

“It is important that women are directly engaged in climate change projects because they are now more involved than ever before in farming and are the real victims of climate change,” said Manandhar. 

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Nepal’s squabbling political parties have squandered an opportunity to pass into law one of the most gender-friendly constitutions ever devised.

After four years of intense work, the 601-member Constituent Assembly (CA) missed a May 27 deadline to adopt a new constitution with political parties failing to agree on restructuring the country into a federation of states based on ethnic lines.

The CA was dominated by Maoists who waged a ten-year (1996-2006) civil war supported by the country’s many ethnic groups and lower castes that were, for centuries, marginalised by a feudal elite and a now defunct monarchy.

The biggest losers of the CA’s failure were Nepal’s women who saw the promise of equal rights dashed as the draft constitution – the key element in the peace process that followed the civil war ¬– had incorporated truly progressive laws.

A feature of the CA, dissolved on May 27, was that it had 197 women members from 20 political parties, the largest ever empowered political representation by women in the history of what was until 2008 a monarchy.

The female legislators had formed a ‘women’s caucus’ which was tasked with writing laws aimed at transforming the nation into a gender equal society.

“The women worked ceaselessly all these years to write laws, paying attention to detail so that no form of discrimination would exist,” caucus member Sapana Malla Pradhan tells IPS.

Pradhan, one of the country’s most prominent public interest litigation lawyers, had fought several landmark cases against gender discrimination over the past decade, forcing legal reforms on such controversial issues as marital rape and inheritance rights.

“Had the constitution been adopted, we could have ensured that women had rights equal to what the men enjoyed so far and what they had deprived Nepali women of,” she said.

Reforms envisaged in the draft constitution would have ensured 50 percent representation for women in every state organ and allowed women to be appointed as ambassadors in Nepal’s missions abroad.

“We would finally have had really progressive laws capable of impacting positively the socioeconomic situation of Nepali women,” independent development practitioner Srijana Pokhrel tells IPS.

Recognition would have been given to the economic value of domestic chores and a special constitutional act was being planned to allow calculation of household work as part of the gross national product.

New reproductive health laws would have obliged the state to allocate resources and financial aid to ensure safe motherhood in a country with one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates.

More than 4,000 women die in Nepal annually due to pregnancy-related causes. There is a huge shortage of skilled birth attendants and the proportion of deliveries conducted by qualified health personnel is only 28 percent.

“We nearly achieved what Nepali women had been fighting for all these decades with all the political parties agreeing to every law proposed by the women’s caucus,” said Pradhan.

The country was to have a powerful women’s commission with members having the authority to investigate any gender-related violation by the state or individuals or any case of discrimination.

Among the most disappointed by the failure of the CA to produce a constitution are women from the oppressed ethnic groups and castes.

“Who do we turn to now for help? I had one last hope and that died last week,” says Urmila Chaudhary, a young woman from one of the most margnalised ethnic groups, the Tharus.

“This is really sad. We are now a country without a constitution,” says Tharu rights activist Krishna Chaudhary, director of Society Welfare Action Nepal, a non-government organisation (NGO).

“The laws prepared for women were especially targeted at those from the most marginalised communities where the rates of female illiteracy and poverty are high,” adds Krishna.

Krishna said his Tharu community had just begun to understand politics and was hopeful that the constitution would help them turn around their situation.

Nearly 90 percent of the four million Tharu people are landless, and the majority extremely poor with the women suffering exploitation.

Nepal’s women have come a long way in their history of fighting for their rights which started on Jul.1, 1932 when Yog Maya Neupane and 68 of her followers drowned themselves in the Arun river after being detained for demanding social justice and reform.

In 1951, when Nepal’s first constitution was written, it still carried features discriminatory to women and, although several reforms have been carried out since, the CA was the first real opportunity at progressive, implementable change.

For example, although Nepalis have the right to receive citizenship in the name of their mothers in principle, the law has never been seriously implemented.

“We have to pick up from where we left off… the democratic political process is absolutely the key,” said Pradhan optimistically.

(END)

Social activists say that attempts to rehabilitate sex workers in this former monarchy call for special efforts to uplift the Badi, a Hindu caste that has for centuries been associated with entertainment and prostitution.

Badi sex workers await rehabilitation. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

Sabitri Nepali was initiated into the traditional vocation of the Badis before she turned 14. Now, at 30, she is baffled by the changes taking place in a country struggling to climb out of a feudal past and transform into a modern, democratic republic.

“My family has survived on this trade for generations. My mother was a sex worker and I continued with the family profession. It was normal for us,” Sabitri tells IPS in this remote village in Kailali district, 700 km west of Kathmandu.

Badis, estimated to number 50,000, live in the western districts of Nepal but find work in the towns and cities of Nepal and neighbouring India, including Kathmandu, Mumbai and New Delhi.

Four years ago the Nepal government banned the Badis from pursuing their traditional occupation after it came under pressure from local communities fearing that the districts where there were Badi concentrations were turning into red light areas.

But, the government made no move to implement the ban, with the result that local communities formed monitoring groups backed by vigilantes that used violent methods to compel the Badis to give up their sole means of livelihood.

“We defied the ban and continued with our traditional occupation. How could we survive without incomes? Think about our children,” says Kalpana Badi,35, who like many others uses a surname that readily identifies her caste and her profession.

The word ‘badi’ is a corruption of the Sanskrit word ‘vadyabadak’, meaning one who plays a musical instrument, and suggests a degradation in the status of the caste over time.

South Asia’s rigid caste system once defined the occupation that people could engage in and Badis formed one group that has been unable to find its way out of an unfortunate position on the social ladder. “We didn’t want to continue with prostitution but the government has failed to fulfill its promises of rehabilitation,” says Bishal Nepali, husband of a Badi sex worker.

The government did announce a package that included housing, income generation activities and scholarships for Badi children, but these were never implemented.

“This has been a very frustrating process. We don’t know why the government has been so indifferent. The Badis are in a desperate situation,” says Uma Badi, a prominent activist and one of a handful of college-educated Badi women.

“Most Badis are uneducated and have no farms or livestock,” Uma explained.

Badis were denied citizenship until 2005 when the Supreme Court ordered the government to grant it to them and also extend financial support.

According to a study published in 1992 by Thomas Cox, an anthropologist then attached to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University, Badi girls “from early childhood, know, and generally accept the fact, that a life of prostitution awaits them.”

Badi girls, the study said, do not get married and commonly bear the children of their clients.

Cox recorded that upper caste Nepali society gives little encouragement to Badi girls to pursue other professions and those among them who enter public schools are “often severely harassed by high caste students.”

Two decades after Cox’s study, the Badis, as members of an ‘untouchable’ Dalit (meaning broken people) caste, are still not permitted use of the village water pump or well and their situation may have worsened.

In Muda village, many Badi girls and women have fled their homes fearing the Muda Anugaman Toli Samiti (a vigilante group) whose members have been accused of beating up Badis and their clients.

Badis are not allowed to run legitimate businesses. “People fear to buy anything from my shop because they fear the villagers,” says Dinesh Nepali, a Badi male who runs a small shop selling cigarettes, vegetables and soft drinks. “How can we survive like this?”

Badi activists are aware that they are prime targets for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals that deal with women’s rights, education and poverty, and that their uplift calls for extraordinary and determined initiatives.

“A handful of non-government organisations and donor agencies have been supporting the empowerment of Badi women, but that is not sustainable. Projects come and go but only government support can provide a long-term solution,” says Uma.

There were hopes that the abolition of the monarchy in favour of republican democracy, at the end of the bloody 1996-2006 civil war, would bring positive changes to the lives of the Badis, but Nepal is still coping with political instability.

“I have met three different prime ministers in the past few years,” said Uma. “They promise support but forget us as soon as we head back to our villages.”

In 2007, Badi activists threatened to march naked through Kathmandu to embarrass the government into implementing the court-ordered rehabilitation, but that brought nothing except more promises.

The local monitoring committees – that are backed by the vigilantes – admit that the government has failed in its promise to help the rehabilitation of the Badis.

“We are trying to help the Badi women start new dignified lives but we do admit that there are no viable alternatives,” says Riddha Bhandari, a leader of Muda’s monitoring group. “The government needs to act now.”

Bhandari denied that the Muda committee was out to destroy the Badis, but said there were worries over adverse influences on non-Badi girls and the possible spread of HIV/AIDS.

By Naresh Newar
DANG, Nepal , Apr 20 2012 (IPS)

Five years after Nepal abolished Kamalari, a system of girl slavery, thousands of young women are still awaiting promised rehabilitation and support from the new democratic republic.

Some 11,000 ‘liberated’ Kamalari girls, many of them from this impoverished southwestern district, hope to see some of the money accumulating since 2006 when the Supreme Court ordered the setting up of a fund for the welfare of the girls and their families.

In 2011 alone, the government allocated close to 2.5 million dollars towards the rehabilitation of the girls, which covered scholarships, vocational training and residential support.

But, so far, not even 70,000 dollars have been spent on the welfare of the former slave girls, according to the Mukta Kamalari Bikash Manch (Free Kamalari Development Forum), a network the girls have formed to fight for their rights.

“We know that there is a huge amount of money set aside for us, but we haven’t seen any of it being used for our rehabilitation,” says 20-year-old Urmila Chaudhary, a former slave girl who was rescued after 10 years of bondage in a wealthy Kathmandu household.

Speaking with IPS in Dang, some 200 km southwest of the capital, Urmila recalls how she was sold into slavery by her parents when she was barely six and deprived of a childhood.

In 2008, Urmila was rescued through the efforts of Friends of Nepal (FNC) and Nepal Youth Opportunity Foundation (NYOF), non-government organisations (NGOs), that jointly rescued over 11,000 girls from extreme exploitation.

Since then, she has been a leading activist against the Kamalari system, pressurising the Nepal government to fulfill its promise.

Introduced during the 1950s, mostly in the five districts of Dang, Banke, Bardiya, Kailali and Kanchanpur in Nepal’s southern plains called the Terai, the Kamalari system was the only way the Tharu ethnic group could pay back debts owed to exploitative landlords.

While Tharu adults and male children were forced to work under a parallel bonded labour system, called ‘Kamaiya’, in the landowner’s farms and household, the girls were sold off under Kamalari.

Young Tharu girls were systematically sold off through middlemen to households in the capital and other major cities on verbal contracts that provided for the payment of 50-70 dollars a year to the parents.

“Rescuing the girl children was a huge breakthrough, but sadly, the girls never received much support from the government,” says Som Paneru, executive director of NYOF.

“We have to start a nationwide protest movement soon and we will take to the streets in the capital to push the government to help former Kamalari,” says Bhagiram Chaudhary, director of Society Welfare Action Nepal (SWAN), an NGO in Dang.

The neglect of Kamalari girls squarely blots the Millennium Development Goals pertaining to education and poverty. Although Nepal boasts of progress in the two concerned MDGs, there are wide disparities among ethnic groups and between rural and urban populations.

The MDGs are eight development goals that United Nations member states are committed to achieving by 2015. The first three pertain to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education and promoting gender equality.

Kamalari girls, due to the extreme poverty of their families, are unable to attend schools and most go hungry, according to activists.

Although enrolment rates in Nepal’s primary schools now stand at 93.7 percent, over 200,000 children from the most marginalised and hardest to reach are out-of-school, according to the MDG Progress Report 2010. NGOs say that most of those out-of-school are from among the Kamalari. “So far, I have only received seven dollars for a whole year and I don’t know what to use the money for,” says Kalpana Chaudhary, a young Kamalari who fears that she will have to drop out of school soon.

“Though they have freedom and no longer have to wake up to slavery each day, they often go to bed hungry,” Urmila said.

Activists fear that the girls will be compelled to return to working as slaves since their impoverished parents cannot afford to take care of them. NGOs like SWAN, NYOF and FNC are struggling to help them, but their funds are limited.

“At the NGO level, we are trying to help with their education and support for their families, but we have limited resources,” says Chaudhury at SWAN.

Chaudhary estimates that the cost of keeping a Kamalari girl in school is about 15 dollars a month. He and the activist Kamalari girls have often travelled to Kathmandu to visit the education ministry, but have only succeeded in spending more resources.

“The government should be taking the responsibility, and they have the funds. We cannot say when we will receive the promised money,” says Urmila. “The parents often scold their girls for coming back home instead of working to support the families.”

Some officials lay the blame on prolonged political instability. The former monarchy is still struggling with a difficult peace process that followed the end, in 2006, of a bloody civil war that lasted a whole decade.

“The price of freedom has been quite high for us, and while we enjoy so much from liberation, our struggle to lead a new life is yet to begin,” says Urmila.

Women affected by HIV in western Nepal stick together to survive. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
RAKAM KARNALI, Western Nepal, Apr 11 2012 (IPS)

Life, already hard in Nepal’s remote western region, is getting worse thanks to HIV infection brought back by men who go to neighbouring India for seasonal work.

Worst hit are the region’s women, many of whom have had to sell off their land and livestock to get HIV treatment for their husbands and, in many cases, for themselves.

Rakam Karnali is typical of the small hamlets that dot the hilly mid-west and far-west regions that are home to most of the seasonal migrants who cross over to India, a country which provides passport-less entry to Nepalis.

The destination for millions of semi-skilled and unskilled Nepali workers, India has 2.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Its big cities are also hubs for sex workers recruited from Nepal’s poverty-ridden regions.

“Nowadays, the men only come back with HIV/AIDS and bring more suffering to the family,” Jala Majhi, who is HIV positive, tells IPS.

Jala said women like her once dreamed of an end to grinding poverty by sending their husbands and able men to work abroad, but too many are coming back with the virus. “The wives not only become widows but are left destitute and infected with HIV/AIDS.”

“I don’t know how much longer I will live. I have accepted my fate, but I am very worried about my children,” says Purna Biswakarma, a 35-year-old widowed by HIV and living with the virus in this remote village.

Western Nepal has a history of neglect by governments in Kathmandu, resulting in deeply ingrained poverty. At least half the population of the region lives below the poverty line with the situation distinctly worse compared to other parts of this least developed country.

According to Nepal’s 2011 census, out of a total population of 26.7 million people, almost two million are working abroad causing hardships to households, but providing badly needed remittances.

Nepal’s 2010 progress report for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals predicts that the target of bringing poverty levels in the country down to 21 percent will be met by 2015.

Nepal, according to the progress report, has also succeeded in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS, one of the eight MDGs, but ground realities in western Nepal appear to be far different.

It is common to see women widowed by HIV forced to work as labourers, in western Nepal, though even this is difficult because of social stigma attached to HIV and fears of contracting the virus among villagers.

“When my husband died, the villagers guessed that he succumbed to AIDS and I was blamed for that,” says 35-year-old Nani Devi Shahi, who was ostracised by the community and forced to live in isolation for many years.

“I was infected by my husband, but people accused me of being a sex worker and infecting more men,” said Jala.

The villagers banned her from walking near their homes and using public taps. Her mother-in-law finally threw Jala out of the house along with her young daughter.

Rakam Karnali village mirrors the harsh reality of Nepal where HIV positive women are stereotyped as having contracted HIV through immoral behaviour and blamed for spreading the disease.

Women infected with HIV are denied access to resources in their own households, according to the report ‘Women and HIV/AIDS – Experiences and Consequences of Stigma and Discrimination-Nepal’, published by Family Health International in 2004. That situation has barely changed.

“After all these years of sensitisation campaigns all over the country there has been little impact, especially for women living in remote areas as society is unwilling to change,” says Rani Devi Bohara, a community social worker.

Bohara blames apathy on the part of the government and development agencies towards the women who live with the multiple traumas of HIV infection, social stigma and extreme poverty.

According to the government’s National Centre for AIDS and STD Control (NCASC), women in the 15-49 age group form over 28 percent of the estimated 55,000 people living with HIV in the country.

“What is needed is not just anti-retroviral medicines but psychological counselling for both the victim and her family as also income generation support and welfare programmes,” she says.

A comprehensive package can be run for such women through the existing system of Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) centres, which are low-cost and needs only a few trained staff, says Bohara.

“Most of the remote villages don’t have VCTs and the few that exist are so poorly run that they hardly make a difference in the lives of these badly traumatised women,” said Ganashyam Bhandari from the HIV/AIDS Alliance, a non-governmental organisation.

Extreme poverty means that the women cannot afford to travel to CD4 count (immune strength testing) centres of which there are just 13 in the country, most of them in urban areas.

“We have been lobbying for travel allowances to be given to HIV positive people, especially those living in the remote areas, but we have not been successful,” Hemant Chandra Ojha, a senior NCASC official, told IPS.

“In this situation we have no choice but to try and survive somehow,” says Nani, leader of a group of widows living with HIV. “The government is not going to help us.

“We do have a united voice now,” says Nani, referring to her group, which resists social discrimination and has learned the value of standing together.

Battered Nepali women catch a moment together. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
DAILEKH, Nepal, Apr 5 2012 (IPS)

Women in Nepal’s remote rural areas stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their men during the bloody 1996-2006 civil war that overthrew an oppressive monarchy, but many now battle domestic violence at home.

Rachna Shahi was only 15 when she joined the Maoist People’s Liberation Army in 2004. Today, she finds herself kicked out by her husband’s family and under pressure to grant him a divorce while her own family refuses to take her back.

“I joined the war to fight for women’s equality and our rights but many women like me are now at the receiving end of both family and society,” Rachna tells IPS. “I don’t know how I will survive now.”

Dhanasara Majhi, who also lives in this remote district 700 km west of Kathmandu, would have committed suicide, except that she does not want to leave her four children to the mercy of their abusive father.

“Sometimes I am tempted to kill myself, as that would end all my sufferings. But who will take care of my children after I die?” she asks wiping her tears and sobbing softly.

Her husband, Keshab Majhi, hits her with anything he finds handy such as an iron rod or a hammer and has even threatened to kill her with an axe.

Majhi gets particularly violent after he drinks alcohol. “We usually run towards the hills and hide in the forest until he is sober,” says Dhanasara. She is worried most for her eldest son, 12-year-old Rosan, who shows signs of being mentally disturbed.

Dhansara does not approach the police, fearing that this will enrage her husband all the more and because she knows that she will get no support from the local community. “My neighbours often accuse me of provoking him. I don’t know who to turn to for help.”

Dhansara and Ruchi share the woes of many Nepalese women, especially in the rural areas where they have little or no access to legal protection and end up living in constant fear and daily abuse.

Despite the alarming rate of violence against women, the government has done little to protect them, say women’s rights activists.

In 2011, there were nearly 700 recorded incidents of violence of which 40 percent were cases of domestic violence, according to the Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), a non-governmental organistion (NGO).

“Lots of incidents are never reported due to fear of reprisal and lack of access to legal aid,” says Khadga Raj Joshi, regional coordinator of INSEC in the western region.

Last year, 54 women were killed by family members in Nepal for disobeying their husbands or in-laws or for petty reasons such as objecting to their husbands’ drinking. Most of the perpetrators got away scot free for lack of evidence, says INSEC.

The Nepal Bar Association provides pro bono legal services in district courts, but these are too far away for women living in the remote rural areas, says Joshi. “Basically, the women are on their own and have no social protection even from their own families,” says Deepa Bohara, a social worker.

“It is socially acceptable for women to get abused at the hands of their husbands, a really disturbing attitude,” says Deepa.

A 2001 survey conducted by the Nepal demographic and health survey found that a large number of Nepali women, both urban and rural, thought it permissible for a man to beat his wife for not performing kitchen tasks properly, going outdoors without permission or denying sex.

Similar attitudes prevail across South Asia with Nepal’s largest neighbours Pakistan and India, ranking third and fourth respectively, in a global survey of perceptions of threats to women ranging from domestic abuse and economic discrimination to female foeticide.

The survey results, released in June 2011 by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, said the fact that “a government is corrupt and that female rights are very low on the agenda means that there is little or no recourse to justice.”

In Nepal, some government support is available to rural women in the para legal services at the Village Development Committees (VDCs), the lowest rung of the rural administration system.

“But, the VDCs have little authority to make any legal decisions and all they can do is encourage a compromise within the family,” says Bindu Khadka, a lawyer with the Forum for Women, Law and Development.

The one hope for rural women is the local police, attached to the country’s 3,915 VDCs, but they often swing in behind the perpetrators as the quickest way to maintain peace.

“We often find that the police, though responsible for prosecution and investigation, pressurise victims to compromise in the name of maintaining peace and harmony in society,” explains INSEC’s Khadka.

“I’m tired of asking the police for help. They do nothing and demand evidence of violence – my word is not good enough,” says 25-year-old Hastana Raut, whose husband abandoned her after three years of marriage.

Nepal, the republic, has seen many legislative reforms in the direction of gender equality ensuring greater economic, citizenship and political rights, safeguarding their sexual and reproductive rights.

Soon after the civil war ended in 2006, Nepal passed the Gender Equality Act giving equal inheritance rights for women and criminalising domestic and sexual violence.

Activists however say that these rights are yet to reach the grassroots levels.

“I feel I will have to live like this for the rest of my life. Who will help me anyway?” asks Pavitra Majhi, 21, whose husband disappeared three years ago, leaving her to be constantly abused by her father-in-law, and beaten by her mother-in-law.