On Yomari Punhi, Newa households follow age-old rituals, and families do not think of it as performing an intangible heritage to be preserved. It is their culture.

Rice flour is kneaded, the molasses is softened, and elders show children how to shape the dough. The filling may evolve, the shape may shift, but the practice continues because knowledge moves across generations. No government office is required to certify its meaning.

In July 2025, the Yomari dumpling was formally added to Nepal’s national intangible cultural heritage list, not by a federal ministry, but after Lalitpur Metropolitan City took the lead.

That distinction sits at the heart of the Intangible Cultural Property (Protection) Bill, 2081, passed by the National Assembly in May 2024 and now in its final stages of becoming a much overdue law. It forces the federal bureaucracy to recognise that heritage is not only what can be excavated, but what people know, practise, and transmit.

To understand why this Bill is monumental yet flawed, one must look at how the modern state learned to govern culture.

The post-1951 state sought categories it could measure and control. Enacting the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1956 and establishing the Department of Archaeology (DoA) were necessary steps to protect physical structures. But it created an unfortunate legal legacy: the state learned to protect stones, while overlooking songs. From 1960 to 1990, the Panchayat state enforced a singular national identity under a unitary policy under king and nation. Cultural diversity was subordinated to state uniformity, and it sidelined living traditions across generations. 

This policy deliberately ignored Nepal’s rich pluralism across 142 caste and ethnic groups, 10 religions, and 124 mother tongues. Article 32(3) of the 2015 Constitution explicitly guarantees the fundamental right of every community to preserve, promote, and protect its language, script, culture, cultural civilisation, and heritage. 

To fulfil this constitutional mandate, the 2081 Bill must dismantle the legacy of Kathmandu-centric assimilation rather than collating central control under new statutory titles.

The delay in correcting this 70-year imbalance is glaring. When Nepal ratified the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010, it pledged to give living traditions equal standing. Instead, for 16 years, that commitment sat untouched while physical monuments monopolised state budgets. The new Bill is long overdue, it is a much-delayed attempt to build the legal architecture to safeguard community practices.

To its credit, the Bill marks a genuine paradigm shift. For seven decades, the state recognised only what could be measured in stone. This law finally elevates oral traditions, living rituals, and inherited skills to that same statutory plane. 

By codifying community-led inventories requiring Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) and recognising master practitioners as ‘Living Human Treasures’, the Bill arms communities with statutory power to assert agency over their memory.

Yet the Bill arrives half-furnished because its governance structure betrays these promises. First, the Recommendation Committee under Clause 5 strips communities of real authority. Stacked with central government officials and state academies, the Ministry’s Culture Division, the Language Commission, the Nepal Academy, and the National Archives: it guarantees no structural seat for a guthiyar, a municipal custodian, or an indigenous practitioner. 

The state creates a system where communities supply knowledge, but central bureaucrats retain the master key. That is state-led extraction, not community safeguarding.

Second, the Bill ignores the financial engine of heritage by leaving Guthi Sansthan, the state corporation managing festival land endowments, completely outside the statutory framework. This creates a legislative absurdity where one ministry officially names a tradition while an entirely separate body controls the funds to run it. 

Instead of absorbing the guthi network, the state ought to empower it using tax incentives, property protections, matching grants, targeted capacity-building, and cultural philanthropy.

Third, relegating the Bill to the International Relations and Tourism Committee reveals Singha Durbar’s true priorities — cultural heritage is treated as a division of tourism rather than a distinct Constitutional domain. It traps living heritage inside a committee more equipped for economic returns rather than community rights.

Committee members have spent critical hours debating whether to use Abhautik (non-physical/intangible) Amurt (formless/intangible), or Maulik (indigenous/original) for the Bill’s name. Vocabulary squabbles will not pay musicians, protect sacred festival routes, or stop land endowments from being siphoned off.

PARALLEL TRACKS

The Bill’s core structural flaw lies in creating parallel administrative tracks for a single inheritance. To a federal ministry, physical monuments and living practices exist in separate legal silos. To a community, they are indivisible. 

A stone temple cannot be separated from the rituals that give it life, nor can a festival survive without the sacred routes and land endowments that sustain it.

Rather than multiplying state bureaucracy, Nepal must establish a unified National Cultural Heritage Board: an autonomous body integrating archaeological preservation, guthi endowments, municipal leadership, and local custodians. 

If aviation and tourism merit dedicated statutory boards under the same ministry, living heritage can no longer be managed as an administrative afterthought.

Yomari dumplings will survive as food adapts, travels, and reinvents itself across generations. But fragile oral chants, seasonal rituals, and specialised craftsmanship will not survive under top-down state control. 

Passing this Bill is historic only because state neglect has been so prolonged. To move from symbolic gestures to genuine protection, Nepal must fix the law’s structural flaws: transfer decision-making authority to local custodians, integrate community land endowments, expand legal protections across every province, and build a single administrative home capable of holding both the stone and the song together.

Alisha Sijapati is a writer and cultural heritage practitioner.