Nepal Now

Send us Fan Mail I’ve followed human rights issues for much of my career. I even worked for the UN human rights office in Nepal soon after the civil war ended in the mid-2000s. Back then, Nepal’s own human rights commission was quite insular, focused on overcoming the huge challenges around the conflict using the few resources it had available in a sometimes hostile environment. I left Nepal for 6...

Send us Fan Mail To its credit the Nepali media has written regularly about successive governments’ lack of action on transitional justice since the Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed in 2006. Reporting has focused on the legal framework, which in 2015 Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled must be revised because it granted amnesty for the most serious crimes of the conflict. In the civil war, from 1996...

Send us Fan Mail ‘The rapist is you’. On October 10th a group of about 20 young women dressed in black took over a street in Kathmandu pointed straight ahead accusingly, and performed the anti-rape song ‘A rapist in your path’. The ‘flash mob’ was protesting what feels like an epidemic of rape in the country. In recent months it seems that every week the media is reporting another violent incident...

Send us Fan Mail In 2019, 19-year-old girls in Nepal were the third shortest in the world, found a recent study by the journal The Lancet that ranked 200 countries.  That’s not simply a genetic thing: ‘Nepalis are short’. A third of adolescent boys and girls in Nepal — 1.8 million — are stunted, or too short for their age. Others are too thin for their age, or wasted. These various forms of undern...

Send us Fan Mail This is a shortened version of our episode with filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar, from Season 1. It was a great interview but, admittedly, quite long. We hope this 'bonus' episode will make Deepak's words more accessible to potential listeners. Important : we did retain the original New York City background sirens :-). The original introduction follows below.  Deepak Rauni...

Send us Fan Mail Rukshana Kapali is a firebrand. At 21 she is leading efforts to change Nepal’s laws so they include transgender men and women, and spearheading work to develop terminology in Nepali, and Nepal bhasa (or Newa language), that is inclusive of people who identify anywhere along the gender spectrum. She has led campaigns to protect lands of Kathmandu Valley’s Indigenous Newa people and...

Send us Fan Mail I liked Mithila painting the very first time that I saw it. The bright colours and village scenes amid lush jungles and bountiful nature really appealed to me, although nostalgically I now realize.  So I was shocked the first time I saw paintings done by today’s guest. Although they  featured the same vibrant colours and verdant backdrops, one example showed two women kissing unde...

Send us Fan Mail Anyone who lives in Nepal knows about caste and untouchability — the social rules that slot people into rigid groups from which they can rarely escape. At the bottom of the caste hierarchy are the Dalits, previously known as untouchables.  Anyone living in Nepal would be aware of the deadly, violent crimes committed against Dalits, almost always with no legal consequences. (Since...

Send us Fan Mail I’ve been following the work of Chandan Kumar Mandal carefully during the pandemic. He’s the labour reporter with the Kathmandu Post and has been writing daily about the millions of migrant labourers who leave their families in Nepal — often for years at a time — to work in neighbouring India or overseas. Many of them have undergone horrendous experiences since Covid-19 flipped th...

Send us Fan Mail 5 to 6 million Nepalis live outside of Nepal today, excluding India and other South Asian countries. That’s according to the non-resident Nepali association. Nepal’s total population is 28 million.   Many emigrants leave for a specific period of time, to either work or study, but others embark for what they hope will be a better life in countries including Australia, the US and th...

Send us Fan Mail As a developing country Nepal has few resources to devote to climate change. But as of late last year it has started to receive money from something called the Green Climate Fund to both reduce its own emissions and adapt to climate change. So far $73 million has been earmarked from the Fund for two projects. But who decides how that money is spent?  Today we’re talking with Tunga...

Send us Fan Mail I obviously don’t know if it’s harder to be a woman in Nepal than in other places, but often it seems like it must be.  Around 1,200 women here die each year giving birth, many from a simple post-delivery haemorrhage. (The fact that no one seems to know the exact number speaks volumes about the importance officialdom places on the issue). Tens of thousands of other women endure th...

Send us Fan Mail Deepak Rauniyar still feels queasy when he remembers the racism he faced growing up in Udaypur district in eastern Nepal. As one of few dark-skinned kids in the community, whose mother tongue was not Nepali, he was taunted by children and singled out for beatings by his headmaster. But as a college student looking for part-time work he soon discovered that journalism gave him the...

Send us Fan Mail According to one of today’s guests, 1 in 5 working age Nepalis is overseas for employment at any one time. In 2019, the earnings sent home by these workers, known as remittances, totalled about $US8 billion, or 25% of Nepal’s gross domestic product, the economic value of its  output.  COVID-19 hammered labour migration, and the lives of many Nepalis. Some remain stuck in countries...

Send us Fan Mail There’s no doubt that today COVID-19 is the main issue in Nepal and in most parts of the world, so I decided when I started planning this podcast that it would be the subject of the first episode. But I also knew that I didn’t want to discuss the daily news — case numbers, quarantine centres, equipment shortages, government mismanagement, etc. Instead, because this podcast is all...

Send us Fan Mail COVID-19 arrived in Nepal at the end of January, 2020, but it was really only in May when it hit, as tens of thousands of migrant workers started arriving home from neighbouring India. As in many other countries, rich and poor, the pandemic has accentuated Nepal’s fault lines, including its health system, inequality and poor governance. And just as in other countries, the time see...