Nepal

State of the Climate in Asia 2024

The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …

VANISHING HERBS

The smuggling of rare medicinal herbs out of Nepal is worrying environmentalists. Important herbs from the western region - including endangered ones like Panchaule, latamansi and Yarchagombu - are being carted to Nepalgunj, and then on to the rich North. Nepalese environmentalists are par '7 ticularly irked that the Pakhanbhed …

Panel inspected

THE setting up ofthe Inspection Panel in September 1993 as a permanent body which will monitor World Bank-funded projects is a significant, far-reaching development. Unfortunately, the World Bank (WB) governing board of executive directors' mode of selection of sensitive areas was highly disappointing. There have been serious objections to the …

No banking on the World Bank...

NARMADAs and, Tehris have been hogging the limelight in India, while a more dramatic and potentially devastating dam on the drawing boards of a neighbouring country - Nepal -has hardly been heard of here. The name of the dam is Arun in, a project designed to be constructed on the …

Ground truths

VILLAGLRS reading satellite images like the back of their hands: it's an absurd oxymoron. But this virtual impossibility is precisely what the Bangalore-based Actionaid team discovered in Nepal recently. The team had started with an unlikely hypothesis: that the local people, with their intimate knowledge of the vicinity's topography, would …

Volte face

NEPAL'S newly-constituted Communist Party government is no longer opposing the controversial World Bank-funded Arun III hydroelectric project in the country's northeast. Even during its election campaign, the Communist Party had joined ranks with anti-dam Nepali environmental activists, who contended that it would wreak havoc on the fragile cloud forest ecosystem …

NEPAL

Helicopters have made mountaineering a less arduous prospect in Nepal, but chopped down the daily earnings of the Sherpas. While tourists can now wing their way up to inaccessible areas, mountaineers can fly out their heavy gears instead of hauling them. "With the helicopters, there is a danger that Sherpas' …

NEPAL

Nepal's controversial Arun III dam is scheduled to come under withering scrutiny. In early February, the World Bank gave its independent inspection panel a green signal to conduct a formal investigation of the project. The panel's mandate will focus on specific aspects of the Arun project which may violate the …

All bark, all bite

WHILE Indians hotly debate whether common folk can be entrusted with the management and control of their forest resources, local communities in several other developing countries are already entrenched in their idyllic fortresses. The results have been, to say the least, positive, even dramatic. In Nepal, village communities have been …

NEPAL

High-altitude cleaning efforts in the Khumbu region of Nepal have made trekking more pleasurable now, reports Himal. The Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC) is supervising a programme that ensures that garbage is not dumped at campsites and along the trek route. The SPCC is preparing rubbish pits, providing tourist information …

SWITZERLAND

High mountains and deep gorges may no longer daunt the 3 million Nepalese who have to travel extensively in the trading season. A Swiss organisation, Helvetas, is building bridges there and training engineers. It was all praise for the indigenous bridge builders, especially from Baglung. "We studied the Nepali bridges …

`Water planners ignore social issues`

Nepal is slated to become one of South Asia"s major power suppliers with the signing of the MoU with Australia for the West Seti project. What are the problems with the project? From the hydro-technical point of view, the project seems okay but other environmental issues like seismicity and sedimentation …

NEPAL

The one-horned rhino population in Nepal's Royal Chitwan National Park has crossed the 450 mark despite widespread poaching, a recent rhino census carried out in the park indicates. The eradication of malaria strains in the Chitwan valley in the '60s opened it up for human settlement. The casualty was the …

Kulekhani dam

Kulekhani dam, Nepal's only high dam hydroelectricity project, faces the unwelcome prospect of closure in less than seven years if the present high levels of sedimentation continue. The Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) is undertaking topographical and geological studies to identify possible sites for check dams to trap silt. "We would …

Cancer Hospital

The travails of Nepal's estimated 50,000 cancer patients may soon be at an end. Instead of going abroad for treatment, they will have access to medical treatment at the 100-bed B.P. Koirala Memorial Cancer Hospital at Chitwan in south Nepal. The US $ 10 million hospital, being built with help …

Child labour on the mat

GERMAN concern for child labour has hit carpet manufacturers in Nepal. A Panos report says that approximately 35 per cent of their export orders have fallen through and 100,000 sq metres of carpet meant for export lie in stores as a fallout of an adverse German television programme. On April …

Holy muck

THE apathy of the Nepalese government to the pollution of the once crystal-pure waters of the Bagmati river has landed it in court, writes Jan Sharma from Kathmandu. Environmentalists have filed a petition at the country's apex court, questioning why action should not be taken against prime minister Girija Prasad …

Drop by drop

KATHMANDU'S summer of discontent seems to have set in. As the residents of the capital city of Nepal faced an unprecedented drinking water shortage, Bimarsha, a Kathmandu weekly, reported that the World Bank had withdrawn its $60 million support from the rehabilitation of the urban drinking water supply in the …

Lighting up villages

THE inauguration of a 400 kw mini hydro-electric project, at Chilambu in Solukhumbu district, 240 km northeast of Kathmandu, has given a boost to hydel power generation in Nepal. The $8 million plant, set up with the help of the Swiss government, is providing electricity to 30 villages in the …

Fretting over fumes

In Nepal, the Environment Conservation Council, headed by prime minister Girija Prasad Koirala, has stipulated permissible smoke limits of 65 Hartridge smoke unit (HSU) on diesel vehicles and 3 percent carbon monoxide standards on petrol vehicles. Initially, the new regulation will cover only government and diplomatic vehicles, reports Jan Sharma …

Farmers dig nature`s dams

FOR nearly 400 years, Nepal has been using an indigenous irrigation system fortified remarkably without the help of cement or girders. The farmers in the Gorkha, Palpa and Rupandehi districts have built over centuries a complex network of canals and weirs using only boulders, tree branches, soil and wood to …

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