THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

In Nepal, the government has supported a community forestry model that has been very successful in giving rights to local communities to manage their own forests. This, however, doesn’t protect the community from private companies, especially giant Indian companies which sell herbal medicines, from entering their forests and simply picking and leaving with kilograms of precious herbs and medicinal botanical materials which they are not compensated for. “People come and pick jari-buti (medicinal herbs) in the forests and leave with basketloads-we have no idea what they are taking,” one woman told me. The other trend has been for private companies to enter communities and offer a token amount of money, for which the community then sells its entire forest for timber, or for furniture industries. A case like this was reported from the Terai, in Southern Nepal, which is close to the Indian border and whose forests have dec...

I’ve lived in Kathmandu since i was born  in 1973. It has  gone from a small city of about 300,000 to about 3 million people.  With the upsurge of population has come unregulated growth of huge housing complexes and apartment buildings, much of it rumored to be backed by Maoists. The sight of giant "modern" buildings rising out of the broken and crushed historical neighborhoods, bulldozed by Baburam Bhattarai's determined march towards modernity, is an odd one. These neighbourhoods would be protected heritage neighborhoods in Spain or Italy, but in Nepal are mere "old" and "feudal" areas to be destroyed as quickly as possible. Baburam Bhattarai, who's gone on record saying: "Give me five years and I will turn Nepal into Bihar", seems to be on track to completely ruin and destroy the historical nature of Kathmandu for some imagined Bihari wonderland of skyscrapers and multi-lane highways which he imagines will turn the switch to prosperi...

Sushma Joshi March 15, 2012 Recent attempts to by-pass regulation include the hasty and secretive way in which the government gave the go-ahead to the Three Gorges Company of China without any competitive bidding to build a dam in Western Nepal, giving itself 25% while China took 75% of the deal. The 1.8 billion dollar West Seti would generate 750 megawatts of energy.  A   parliamentary probe   was held around Three Gorges' contract in Nepal. With public inquiry, the deal was changed to 49% for Nepal Government and 51% for the Three Gorges Company. And yet, the way in which this deal was structured and the way in which it was initially passed should have all of us asking questions on whether this electricity will ever be delivered--especially with the way this company has already tried to defraud the Nepal Government with an absurdly unfair deal from the start. The lack of environmental assessments, including issues of sustainability, is another troubling...

IS FEMINISM OUTDATED? By : SUSHMA JOSHI   Photo by :ECS Media March 06, 2012 A cousin of mine met me for the first time in his life, and we had a pleasant time meeting each other. Later in the day, he confessed, “I don’t know what I was expecting when I came to meet you, honestly. Somebody had told me…” here he looked at me with alarmed eyes, and his voice lowered a notch: “A feminist!” The way he said feminist made me wonder what he had been imagining me to be like. How exactly does a feminist appear in the popular imagination? From the tone of his voice, it was almost as if he had expected to meet someone with two horns on her head, breathing fire out of her nostrils. People in Nepal, I find, are particularly misinformed about what a feminist is and what feminism stands for. The dictionary defines feminism as a “collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social ...

Published in Bertelsmann Future Challenges , 26 January 2012 We know a lot about Burma. We know of violations of human rights waged against the political opposition and ethnic minorities, recruitment of child soldiers, political prisoners, refugees, and forced labor. We also know about the ongoing struggle between the military junta and Aung San Suu Kyi and her many house arrests. When people need an example of an undemocratic country, they will quote Burma and North Korea. US government officials have been quoted as saying the Burmese regime is the most difficult to deal with. It is easy to imagine that we know everything there is to know about the country. In Burma I could sense such oppression in the very air of Yangon. But I also encountered some unexpected things that we don’t normally think about when we think of Burma. We know that we do have something to teach the Burmese state. But is there something the Burmese people have to teach us? The boys running the stall in Yan...

Published in Bertelsmann Stiftung's "Future Challenges" 11 January 2012 I was in Bangkok last mid-April when it started to pour heavily with rain. I was in Sukumvit Road, the heart of the commercial district. Trying to walk to my hotel, I found that my road quickly flooded with rain within a few hours. I returned to Kathmandu, and followed with anxious trepidation news of the flooding in Thailand via Twitter and Facebook. The stories of old people guarding their small homes by the river banks worried me. I emailed my friends to find out if they were okay. One had fled her home with her parents, an elderly aunt and two dogs. Another friend told me the bottom floor of her parents’ house, close to the airport, had been flooded. The damage to the city seems immense. And yet, isn’t water a precious commodity, one we should celebrate if we get more of it? I learnt from a Thai animation made by volunteers to inform the general public that the reasons for the flooding wer...

October 2011, Himal South Asia Magazine By Sushma Joshi Tracking down a far-off Nepali community. My flight to Yangon on 18 June is cancelled. Thai Airways announces that heavy rain has closed Yangon airport. In the restless gloom of the waiting area, rumours start to spread. The Myanmar Army has taken over the airport, people whisper. Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday is a day away. Has some event occurred while they have been away? Young fathers sit staring into space, wondering whether they can ever return home. We get bussed to the Amaranth Hotel, a fancy five-star hotel in the outskirts of Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. Using my wireless thumb drive, I e-mail my friend in Washington, DC, and request her to check Twitter. Within a few minutes, I get my answer: a plane has skidded off the tracks at Yangon airport. Flights supposed to land there are being rerouted to Singapore. We fly to Yangon the next morning. In the excited conversations I start up with my fellow travelle...