THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Sushma Joshi Bertelsmann Future Challenges March 9, 2013 A road expansion campaign in Kathmandu has been initiated by  Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai . This campaign has been ongoing since September 2011.The project has received  mixed feedback . Praised for adding significant width to main roads in need of widening, it has also been criticized for its lack of planning, including the way roads have been haphazardly wrecked without any seemingly coherent schedule to restore them. The citizens of Kathmandu have been breathing dust for about two years now, increasing the incidence of asthma, bronchitis and other health issues.  Many trees were lost in the project with no plans for replanting. Those who lost their homes have not been compensated-although the spaces cleared appear to have been quickly filled with large and rather ugly commercial buildings with backing from big business. No attempts have been made to promote public transport: the road wid...

To: Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai, Baluwatar, Kathmandu Nepal Subject: Make the System Work, Help Deliver Justice Dear Prime Minister, When Sita Nepali, a Nepali citizen aged 21, arrived home after working in Saudi Arabia earlier this month she was robbed at the hands of  Immigration Officials at the Tribhuvan International Airport. A Nepal Police constable then took authority of her, took her to a hotel, and proceeded to rape her that night. This blatant crime against a Nepali citizen, perpetrated by a Nepali government official and a Nepali police constable, must be addressed by the government immediately. The crime is all the more horrific because the robbery was perpetrated on someone who had worked with great difficulty in a foreign nation to support her family. We urge your office and the Home Ministry to immediately investigate this case and set an example of how violence against women will not be tolerated in Nepal.  We urge you to use ...

November 13, 2012 You can read my article on "Paris and Style" in the special Dashain edition of ECS Living (Number 70) magazine. Here's the PDF of the magazine, uploaded on ISSUU : http://issuu.com/sansarmedia/docs/living_70

              I became the latest “unwilling beneficiary” of development as Nepal’s road-building program, which has been ongoing since September 2011, recently came and bulldozed my wall. Along with the wall, we also lost one dozen old growth trees that my grandfather had planted about a century ago. The wall had to go in order to widen the lane from its existing width, the road-builders insisted-even though the lane allowed for water tankers, ambulances etc to pass by at its current width. No matter that the area was a historic area where jatras/festivals had been held for centuries, and which would have benefited from a more rational cultural heritage preservation policy. The lane widening was for these few feet-the new wall is on the left. For this, the historic neighbourhood lost around 2 dozen old growth trees. Axing down Kathmandu's ecological heritage. Old growth jackaranda that took over ...

Sushma Joshi In the past few months, the Maoist government decided to start a road-widening program in Kathmandu. Interestingly, they have taken their road-widening program precisely through all the most historic neighborhoods of Kathmandu. From Baluwatar, where the Prime Minister’s office is located, they intend to blast through the old neighborhoods of Bhatbhateni, which is already heavily congested with traffic. Wider roads, it appears, is not conducive to better traffic flow or better neighborhoods. From Bhatbhateni, the road would curve down to Handigaon.  Handigaon is the oldest known settlement of the Kathmandu Valley, and archeologists have discovered temples and treasures dating back to ancient times. It should be closed off to traffic, like the Patan Durbar Square, and the government should be giving funds to restore its old temples and buildings. Instead, they are appropriating land from the people in the neighborhood so they can have a smooth SUV ride. Despite ...

A two-day workshop considering the lives and movements of Nepalis in all parts of the world was held in Oxford as part of the AHRC project Vernacular Religion: Varieties of Religiosity in the Nepali Diaspora, co-directed by David Gellner and Sondra Hausner. The discussion circled the globe: the panel discussions started in India, continued east to Southeast Asia (Thailand, Burma, and Singapore), west to the Gulf, and across the earth to North America and Europe (UK and Belgium), in order both to draw out patterns of similarity among Nepali populations across the world and identify possible differences between locations. One overarching similarity was the strength of the associational life of Nepalis everywhere in the world (although there were apparent differences in the kinds of organizations that had the most popularity and momentum). And one paradoxical problem that emerged everywhere—but had seemingly different responses in different places—was whether Nepalis thought of themselve...

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...