<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221108121140/636a40e49c7e80680e04a648jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="544"/>One of the most prominent changes we see while travelling across Nepal these days is the presence of earth movers, <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/nation/bulldozing-democracy-in-nepal,4184">bulldozers</a>, tipper trucks and excavators. They dominate the highways, gouge out riverbeds, claw at mountainsides and rip through forests.There may be many planners in Singha Darbar who claim to be the drivers of development. But out in the hinterland, we know who is really making development ‘happen’.Ask Nepalis in the districts what they want the most, and the answer will be “a road”. For them ‘road’ is synonymous with ‘development’, and they are going to get them by any means possible. If anyone still had any doubts, <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/editorial/trickledown-corruption,4176">Kathmandu is no longer in charge</a>, thanks largely to the devolution of decision-making in the new Constitution.The road-building spree is now fuelled by <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/uncategorized/elected-contractors/">local governments</a>, which get to spend money quite indiscriminately. Yet, with <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/here-now/survey-is-wakeup-call-for-nepal-government/">three-fourths of the population now having access to some kind of road</a>, public demand for any old road is now being superseded by an insistence on black-topped roads that will not be washed away in the next monsoon. Quality is slowly taking precedence over quantity.<a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=18019#.XNpIyuUza70">Roads are a two-way</a> street. They may be designed and built to take local produce to market, but roads also bring the market to remote villages. This can have a huge <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/nation/Nation-road-from-nowhere-to-nowhere,549">negative impact</a> on the local economy if competitiveness is lost. Roads can also become an incentive to produce more, or disincentive to pack up and leave for the city or go abroad.Socio-economic and environmental studies are conducted before a road is built, but there is little to show that these recommendations have been studied, much less implemented. Roads may take local trout, strawberries and vegetables to the market, but they also enable human trafficking and the spread of HIV, and push land prices beyond the reach of the poor.On 13 May, Himalayan TV, Dooshan, Facts and V-chitra gave out excellence awards to projects that met new, higher standards. One surprise award went to the restoration of the historic Pim Bahal neighbourhood of Patan.The second surprise was that no one was awarded in the large project category: sending a message that there was plenty of room for improvement. Such due diligence to select winners will in future ensure that the quality of construction will improve. As the saying goes, when everyone stays average, the average goes down – this is what has long plagued the infrastructure sector in Nepal.<a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=12390#.XNpJtOUza70">Dozers are literally changing the face of Nepal</a>. Mountains are no longer the barriers they were, which may be the necessary first step toward prosperity through connectivity. However, this process must ultimately deliver the kind of prosperity that can come with easier movement of value added goods and services. The cost of transport must go down over time.To attain such results, maintenance, management and upgrading of infrastructure must be a continuous process. Roads can not only pay for themselves, they can generate huge revenue in the longer term. Building infrastructure is not expenditure, as is currently perceived, but an investment.Many construction projects today are undertaken through a flawed public procurement regulation that awards the contract to the lowest bidder. This has resulted in many destructive projects and a waste of taxpayers’ money. In future, many projects will be designed, resourced and implemented by the private sector. Competition will help improve things in general.The government can collaborate with the private sector, as we are seeing in hydropower, hotels, schools and hospitals. There could even come a time when development partners will buy back well constructed social infrastructure built by the private sector as their contribution to Nepal’s development.During a recent trip up the Trisuli River, it was heart-warming to see dozers expanding the road to Kerung. Dozers are for development, it just depends on who is driving them.

Anil Chitrakar

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Dozers and Nepal’s development

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221107121140/6368ef289c7e80680e035964jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="953"/><figcaption>MOVING MOUNTAINS: The remote district of Bajhang is a microcosm of what rampant, random roadbuilding fuelled by local corruption is doing to the environment across Nepal.</figcaption></figure>Paramananda Joshi is 90, but in his long life he had never seen anything like it. The <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/editorial/deep-water,3883" target="_blank" rel="noopener">flash-flood</a> swept though his village of Malumela here in the remote mountains of far-western Nepal, washing away farms and making 45 families landless in an instant.In the village of Tollodhika, the Gole Khola flooded for the first time in living memory. The sudden flood swept away five people crossing the stream. That evening, a jeep carrying five people was washed away by the Chaitya River with a ferocity locals had never seen before.“It is just a brook, and it had been raining for less than an hour before the floods came down without warning, how did that happen?” asks Ramdal Mijar, 54.Scientists blame <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/mixed-blessings-in-mustang/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">extreme weather events caused by global warming</a>, the impact of which has been exacerbated by a construction spree of unplanned and poorly built roads along fragile mountain slopes.In all, 10 people have been killed by raging floods since April in this area of Bajhang that has seen much road-digging. The crop damage has been extensive, and pushed many farmers in this already food-deficit region to the brink of starvation.The <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/nation/Recharging-the-mountains,3465" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Himalayan mid-hills have always had floods and landslides</a>, but how can barely one hour of rain cause such havoc? Why do normally calm streams suddenly turn into angry torrents of mud?“Cloudbursts are becoming more frequent because of erratic weather caused by climate change. Badly constructed roads upstream that alter natural drainage patterns make the floods worse,” explains the Bajhang soil conservation officer Sunil Kumar Gupta.Flooding has been prevalent and unpredictable throughout Nepal during unusually heavy pre-monsoon showers this year. But even normal precipitation can trigger landslides because haphazard road construction disturbs natural drainage, unleashing flash-floods downstream.Finding details about new roads nationwide is impossible. Even the Department of Roads doesn’t have proper records. Bajhang district authorities have no idea where roads are being built, but unofficially we tallied at least 165 currently under construction. There are more than 75 heavy earthmovers in Bajhang alone.Every infrastructure project must by law have an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). None of the new improvised roads here have done EIAs.Five years ago the Local Development Ministry (LDM) ordered all District Development Committees to notify them of the use of bulldozers and excavators. They were encouraged to minimise the use of diggers, and have have an engineer present when using them.“These rules are flouted everywhere, no one is enforcing them,” admits Nripraj Joshi of the District Technical Committee. After <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/from-nepali-press/Elected-contractors,4182" target="_blank" rel="noopener">an earlier expose by the Centre for Investigative Journalism</a> and being questioned by the LDM, several discussions were held. But that did not go anywhere.Besides floods, road-building has set off rockfalls that have ruined terrace farms. Madan Rokaya has a family of 13, and was once happy that a road was coming to his village. But his terraces were buried by landslides set off by road construction. “I am ruined, I have no land and am now begging for work,” says Rokaya.Subeda village (pictured below) once had the district’s most fertile farms, and its 30 or so families were well off. But most of its farms have been destroyed by rocks and boulders tumbling down the mountains from a road alignment. The contractor, Lama Golden JV, shows no remorse.<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221107121140/6368ef2c9c7e80680e035965jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="1000">Singh Bir Rokaya says farmers like him are helpless: “We are just spectators, many of our farms are buried under rocks.”The District Agriculture Office has collected complaints, and says 1,800 families in 40 villages in Bajhang have been affected by road building. Already destitute, many families here have become landless.It is not just farms that have been destroyed, traditional irrigation systems that hugged the contours of mountains have been blocked or washed away by road construction up the slopes.Land is being covered and rendered useless, KC says. He questions the logic of such development, when it means people are being displaced. But there is more to the problem, because water supply is also disrupted. Several irrigation structures have fallen prey to the dozers, he says.“Of the 440 irrigation schemes we had in Bajhang, more than 283 have been destroyed by the bulldozers,” says Rajesh Kumar KC of the Agriculture Development Office here.“The excuse from local politicians is always the same,” KC says, “they tell us that there is always destruction when there is development. They say destruction is temporary whereas development is permanent.”Water supply schemes are also affected. The Padamjelya Drinking Water Project in Sireta village that served 72 families and completed last year at a cost of Rs350,000 was damaged two months later by reckless road construction.“We all volunteered to build this water supply, our dreams are ruined,” says Bijay Joshi. Two other drinking water projects have also been ruined in the area, and locals are back to drinking contaminated water from rivers and springs.<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221107121140/6368ef309c7e80680e035966jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1460" height="1498"><figcaption> </figcaption></figure>When approached, local politicians often try to shift the blame. <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/from-nepali-press/Elected-contractors,4182" target="_blank" rel="noopener">One-third of the officials, elected village heads and mayors are contractors, or are from families that own construction companies</a>.They also own excavators and bulldozers and rent them to the municipalities. Many have been found to be awarding contracts to themselves. Devolution under federalism was supposed to stop such greed and lack of accountability, but it appears to have <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/editorial/trickledown-corruption,4176" target="_blank" rel="noopener">democratised corruption</a>.To be sure, there are examples of mountain roads that heed the environment and try to minimise the damage to the local economy. The green road concept tries to ensure minimum disruption to slopes, and plan roads to create farm jobs and market access for produce.Unfortunately, the roads being built haphazardly by local governments lack many of these essential attributes. Seismologists warn that <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/here-now/past-disasters-foretold/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">western Nepal could be hit by a long overdue mega-earthquake</a>, and mountains destabilised by poorly designed roads could trigger catastrophic slope failures.Says Upama Ojha of Geohazards International: "Things are bad enough during normal times, but the haphazard use of bulldozers have increased landslide risk. It is unthinkable what will happen during an earthquake."Province 7 Chief Minister Trilochan Bhatta was recently visited by a group of concerned residents of Thalara-9 which was threatened by the risk of flood and landslide. They told him: “It has been three years since we have slept soundly because of the danger from road construction.”New road constructions even threaten existing highways. Bajhang’--s lifeline to the Tarai was recently black-topped, but rockfall debris from another road up the mountain obstructs it frequently. Last month the important artery was blocked by a landslide triggered by the construction of a feeder-road for two weeks.“The road should never have been built without analysing the environmental impact, and close supervision of the construction methods,” says Chief Engineer Lalijan Khanal of the Department of Roads in the neighbouring district of Baitadi. He said he wrote repeatedly to the district administration about the danger posed by excavators. “They didn’t listen to me,” he says.Such obstruction can mean life or death. Five patients died last year because they couldn’t be taken to hospital when the road was blocked for more than a month. The landslide that blocked the highway was caused by excavator activity on the feeder road above it.Centre for Investigative Journalism<h2>DEADLY TOLL</h2><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221107121140/6368ef339c7e80680e035967jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1300" height="975">May 8: Sub-engineer Narayan Dahal died in a landslide at the Chainpur-Taklakot road section in Ramaili.May 6: Five people, including four of the same family, were killed by a flood in the Guhe River in Thalara village. Livestock was killed. Five houses were swept away and the Juilgad hydropower plant was put out of action.May 2: Three people were killed when a flashflood swept away their jeep on the Chauthiya river. Over 152 hectares of farms were destroyed, more than 50 livestock were killed.April 27: Floods caused by road building inundated 130 hectares of land and destroyed crops in Sabik village. Farmers lost Rs300 million worth of standing crops.<h2>Duplication road</h2><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221107121140/6368ef369c7e80680e035968jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="2198" height="1280">It is not just local governments that are on a nationwide road construction spree. The NCP government announced it had set aside Rs 4.5 billion for the so-called Madan Bhandari Highway in its last budget. The new highway will span 1.200 km from Jhapa in the east to Dadeldhura in the west, cross 14 districts – most them in the ecologically fragile Chure Range and the Inner Tarai (depicted on map above).The announcement caught many by surprise because it was made without conducting an Environmental Impact Assessment or a Detailed Project Report. Moreover, there has been no satisfactory explanation as to why there was a need for another east-west highway when there is already the Mahendra Highway, the Mid-hill Highway and the Tarai Feeder Road project.When asked, spokesperson Rajendra Sharma of the Ministry of Physical Planning and Transportation said parts of the new highway were already in existence, and the Madan Bhandrai Highway would just connect the missing bits. He also said the region served by the road was rich in limestone deposits, and would serve existing and future cement factories.“In fact, you could call this a cement highway,” Sharma told us.However, Dhananjaya Poudel of the Ministry of Environment expressed surprise that his ministry was never consulted about the highway, and that budget was allocated without studying its environmental impact and economic feasibility.He added: “You have to take into account the geography, geology, vegetation, environment, and the impact on human settlements before undertaking a project like this. Only then can you minimise the damage.”Kalpana BhattaraiRead also:<a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/from-nepali-press/Elected-contractors,4182" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Elected contractors</a>, Mukesh Pokhrel <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/editorial/trickledown-corruption,4176" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Trickle down corruption</a>, Editorial <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/nation/bulldozing-democracy-in-nepal,4184" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bulldozing democracy</a>, Om Astha Rai

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From nowhere to nowhere

At the stroke of the midnight hour, it finally came to something everyone in Nepal’s oldest and biggest party had been dreading — a split.
Not that this was anything new. The Nepali Congress (NC) had splintered twice before and the main protagonist both times was five-time prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. After the GenZ uprising and being physically mauled and his house looted and set on fire on 9 September Deuba had said he was stepping aside, but it seems old ambitions die hard.
The showdown between the Gagan Thapa-Bishow Prakash Sharma camp and Deuba came to a head on Wednesday as the establishment leadership decided to suspend Thapa, Sharma, and Farmullah Mansoor for five years to punish them for daring to challenge the leadership and hold a special general convention.&nbsp;
Bhrikuti Mandap in the centre of Kathmandu is the venue for trade exhibitions, but this week it was where an exhibition of everything that is wrong with Nepali politics was on full display — lack of internal party democracy and an unaccountable gerontocracy clinging on to power.&nbsp;
Thapa and Sharma had gathered the support of 62% of the NC membership at their convention and chose Gagan Thapa as the new party leader and proposed him as a prime ministerial candidate after the 5 March election.
Deuba’s allies had refused to attend or endorse the special general convention, and were adamant about holding a general convention to choose a new party head after the election. Thapa, Sharma and their supporters argued that the party faced ignominious defeat in the polls if Deuba insisted on being prime minister again.
The events of September 2025 have cast a long shadow over Nepali politics, with many new parties and alliances pledging to represent the aspirations of the GenZ movement. However, that realisation does not seem to have dawned on the tried, tested and failed leadership of the NC, UML and the NCP where the party leaders have held on to power by sidelining all rivals. &nbsp;
Thapa and Sharma were NC general secretaries held multiple rounds of discussions to convince Deuba to accept their eight-point demand that for the party’s and the country’s sake his time was up, and he should cut and cut cleanly. Despite having already handed over the party leadership to Purna Bahadur Khadka in September, Deuba refused to step down.&nbsp;
‘What demands has the Nepali Congress been unable to reconcile that it is headed for a split? There is no ideological dispute, just a proposal to make it easier to go for the election,’ noted journalist and author Narayan Wagle. ‘If those who have been in politics for so many years cannot reach an agreement, what have they learned in life and what hope is there for the country?’
Gagan Thapa was elected unopposed as the new party president on Thursday midnight, with Sharma and Pushpa Bhusal appointed vice-presidents. Thapa has said backroom talks are still ongoing though mediators, but for all intents and purposes the split seems irreconcilable.&nbsp;
The million dollar question now is: who gets to be the real Nepali Congress? Who gets the NC’s tree election symbol at the polls?
Both the Thapa and Deuba factions have written to the Election Commission (EC) laying claim to the party and its symbol. Whatever the EC decides, with less than two months to go for the polls, the dispute over its legitimacy will almost certainly have to be decided in the courts.
Deuba and his counterpart K P Oli in the UML have been unwilling or unable to fathom the level of outrage that young Nepalis feel about their parties. They have shown an inability to heed the call for institutional overhaul within parties and in Nepal’s political culture post-September. Second generation leaders within those parties who have grown old waiting for reform, seem to have better internalised the need for internal restructuring.&nbsp;
Oli has managed to hold on to power after displaying increasing authoritarianism within his UML, while Deuba has shown an unwillingness to bow out of leadership with grace. Both have squandered away their legacy.
For Gagan Thapa, the events of Thursday was a culmination of his long-standing claim for leadership change within the NC coupled with a compulsion to address the demands of the youth movement to maximise gains for his party this election. Just like Deuba, Thapa’s house was also looted and torched during the September protests.
Thapa told Onlinekhabar on Thursday: “Our belief was that we cannot go into elections under the present circumstances under [Sher Bahadur Deuba’s] leadership and with him as the party’s prime ministerial candidate. We would lose.”
The special general convention has taken further steps for reform, endorsing amendments to the party statue, which has set term limits for key leadership positions, including a one-term limit for party president, two-term limit for prime minister, three for a ministerial position, and four terms for a directly elected member of Parliament. Meanwhile, party members are only allowed to become lawmakers through the Proportional Representation system for one term.&nbsp;
If Thapa’s leadership holds legitimacy, this new chapter for the NC might come as a welcome change to young Nepalis who have been calling for leadership overhaul and internal party reforms within the establishment parties. But it may also come at the cost of the NC’s core base. It remains to be seen which side tips the scale at the polls.&nbsp;
The NC’s infighting and institutional shake-up has also posed fresh concerns about how it will affect the election schedule just as it looked as though all the mainstream political parties were finally on board and preparing for the polls. With voting barely weeks away, Nepal’s political parties are still too busy cleaning up their own house to give too much time to work on their platforms, agendas and serious campaigning
Historically, political break-ups and make-ups in Nepal are not set in stone. Even the newest alliance between Rabi Lamichhane’s RSP and Kulman Ghising’s UNP did not even last 12 days. &nbsp;Balen Shah is set to resign from his mayor position in the next and has gotten into the thick of election preparation with the RSP. His next step will be to choose which constituency he is going to contest from.
Meanwhile, in the light of a new day, the two NC factions may still decide that breaking up is hard to do when they are so close to elections, and the political stakes are so high.&nbsp;

Grand split in Nepal’s grand old party

Only a handful of people who witnessed the 1934 megaquake as children are still alive. And the memories of 2015 are fading fast.&nbsp;
We were shaken, but have not stirred into action. We have not even started preparing to be prepared for the inevitable, for it is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.&nbsp;
Thursday 15 January was National Earthquake Safety Day commemorating the 1934 disaster that killed 10,000 people in Kathmandu Valley at a time when its population was barely 100,000.
Nepal is in an active seismic zone, and a really big one is overdue in the seismic gap in western Nepal where there has not been a megaquake for 500 years. The 7.8M quake in 2015 did not completely release the tectonic stress below Central Nepal.
An 8M+ earthquake epicentred in western Nepal will be even more violent than the 2015 one in Kathmandu and will be powerful enough to cause destruction across northern India as well.&nbsp;
We Nepalis are resilient, but we are also complacent and fatalistic. How else does one explain the unsafe and unplanned building construction in Kathmandu, Pokhara and other towns despite frequent reminders of what quakes can do?&nbsp;
Most designs are ad hoc and follow no engineering logic. Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) is now widespread across the country since such structures mostly withstood the 2015 event. But structural engineers say most concrete buildings are substandard, and can be death traps. Also, the country lacks equipment and training for search and rescue in cement houses.&nbsp;
FIRE HAZARD
If an earthquake struck Kathmandu on a windy winter evening, there is the added risk of fires from gas cylinders in collapsed buildings spreading across the densely packed city core. Fire trucks will not be able to reach those areas because the streets will be blocked.
Seismic risk is now amplified by climate breakdown. Nepal now needs to factor in the co-hazard of massive avalanches and Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) triggered by future earthquakes. There are 41 potentially dangerous glacial lakes in the region, and 27 of them are in Tibet feeding rivers that flow into Nepal. A megaquake there could cause multiple simultaneous GLOFs.&nbsp;
If the 2015 earthquake had not happened on a Saturday, tens of thousands of children could have been killed in the 7,000 schools that were flattened. More than 2,500 government buildings came down, and would have killed and trapped many if it had not been a weekend.
Schools and health facilities retrofitted before the disaster were unscathed, and served as shelters for survivors. Chhatrapati Free Clinic (CFC) was reinforced three years before the earthquake for Rs5.2 million, and with support from National Society of Earthquake Technology (NSET), 800 community members were trained in search and rescue.
Bhuwaneswori Secondary School in Bhaktapur and Bal Bikas Secondary School in Kathmandu both survived 2015 because they had been retrofitted. Singha Darbar, the Supreme Court and the Department of Roads buildings were also made seismic resistant after 2015 quake, but the arson attacks on 9 September gutted them.
While many private residential homes built after 2015 continue to flout building codes, municipalities are now stricter. New schools and colleges, hospitals and high rises now have to meet stringent requirements for seismic resistance.
Nepal is a hotspot for many types of disasters — earthquakes, floods, droughts, glacial outbursts, wildfires. These are not ‘natural’ disasters, they are human induced. Earthquakes do not kill people, poorly-built buildings do. Climate breakdown is anthropogenic.&nbsp;
Waiting for a disaster to strike means we have waited too long. Search and rescue readiness are well and good, but much more important is preparedness — seismic resistance structures especially of public buildings, strict zoning to establish open spaces, pre-positioning supplies and simulated drills.
We do not know how much time we have before the next one. But it is not too late to start preparing. &nbsp;
Sonia Awale

Shaken, but not stirred

The series <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/multimedia/looking-good-by-doing-good">Nepal Made</a> profiles world-class Nepali products and the people behind them. Deepak Acharya was born and raised in Simara, before his uncle took him to Pokhara when he was only in sixth grade. After class, he helped sell jackets and outdoor gear at his uncle's Lakeside store. &nbsp; Twenty-two years later, &nbsp;Acharya is still selling jackets. Not international brands like he used to, but products of his own outdoor gear company, DOLPO.&nbsp; Acharya and his brother-in-law, Krishna Ammai, started making and selling jackets and gear for international companies out of Thamel. After losing his business partner in the 2015 earthquake, he was done selling imported items. He launched his own line of outerwear, named after Nepal’s rugged and remote district, known for its stunning arid landscape. The careful selection of the name DOLPO paid off. It took off, providing a high-quality, affordable Nepal-made alternative to foreign companies.&nbsp; “A lot of work went into choosing the name Dolpo,” says Acharya, who considered what came into people’s minds when they heard the name of a place with double-O sound. “I wanted a brand that local customers would instantly relate to toughness and mountains.” The elegant logo reflects this as well, made up of two overlapping rounded triangles denoting mountains with a third peak in the middle. Underneath is ‘DOLPO’ in upper case sans serif.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260116120148_968d9354094049265372d851d0e44e16ae4fc86b5631481e365e6e977f13d37d.jpg" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="20260116120148_968d9354094049265372d851d0e44e16ae4fc86b5631481e365e6e977f13d37d" data-rendition-name="original" width="854" height="1280" loading="lazy" alt="Dolpo NT"> <figcaption>Photo: DOLPO</figcaption> </figure>  RIGHT QUALITY, RIGHT PRICE “Our philosophy is Right quality, Right price,” says co-founder Deepak Acharya, adding with a smile that the pricing strategy of a particular competitor has made business easy: “The employees at North Face may sell North Face, but they wear Dolpo.” The rebranding was so successful that Acharya regrets not launching it sooner. The reason for the success is that the outdoor gear market in Nepal has taken off with more and more domestic tourists trekking in the high mountains to share their adventures on social media.&nbsp; Nepalis seem to be consciously choosing sustainable, Nepal made products of international quality. Acharya says: “Of course, there will always be a demographic that only wears North Face, or Sonam. But we have the right design, right price philosophy.”&nbsp; DOLPO uses fabric and material mainly from Japan, and adheres to strict quality control. The reversible down jackets, windcheaters, shorts, fleece-lined pants, trekking trousers, backpacks, and polo shirts can be bought through its website, or two exclusive flagship stores in Sorakhutte and Thamel Chok. “After the rebrand, we slowly made a digital platform, marketed online, and worked with a delivery company to get items directly to buyers,” says Acharya. “We have no brokers or middlemen to keep prices low for the consumer.” DOLPO is a family business with Acharya’s mother and sister also involved, and nephew Nishant Ammai driving digital sales. Acharya points out that there is a lot of business opportunity in Nepal, as there are too many low-quality products being sold at too high a price. &nbsp;“The market is begging for an auto-correction,” he says. For Nepal’s pessimistic youth who are fleeing the country, Acharya urges patience: “The younger generation wants shortcuts. The mindset is to set up a venture and in three years they will be set for life. But this is not how success works.” “Choose a field, put in ten years of effort, really learn about it, and then you will see the vast possibility present in Nepal,” he continues.&nbsp; Last month, the DOLPO logo was seen on the jerseys of the Biratnagar Kings in NPL 2. The company made hats, jackets, and jerseys for star-studded cricket players including Lokesh Bam, Sandeep Lamichhane, Faf Du Plessis, and Martin Guptill. The Kings finished second in the group, and although Acharya is a football fan, he is happy to contribute to the rise of cricket in Nepal. &nbsp;&nbsp;

Proud to wear DOLPO

Illegal wildlife trade is the fourth most lucrative trafficking crime after drugs, humans, and weapons. Most wildlife ends up in China and Southeast Asia to be used mainly in traditional medicine or as bushmeat. Nepal is both the source and transit for wildlife trafficking, and while the authorities have been successful in protecting flagship mammals like tigers, rhinos, and leopards, the country still serves as a major transit point for less popular wildlife. Despite strict laws against wildlife crimes members of indigenous communities are easily tempted by organised transboundary criminals. They are recruited to poach endangered animals and plants, and end up in jail, while ring leaders are rarely caught.&nbsp; Many are not hardened criminals, just regular folk like Bishnu Adhikari, 30, who served time in Kathmandu’s Central Jail. He had gone with a friend to sell pangolin scales without knowing it was illegal and that the punishment was so harsh. Bikash Chhetri, a Grade 11 student, was riding a motorcycle with college friends when they were intercepted by the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB). Chhetri says he had no idea his &nbsp;friend was carrying the contraband in his bag. Both Adhikari and Chettri served five years in jail. But most people from Nepal’s indigenous communities are often unaware of the protected status or importance of the wildlife they were recruited to smuggle, handle, or transport. “Most of indigenous people involved in wildlife trade in Nepal are not criminals, they are poor and live near protected areas are simply trying to support their families, and mostly it is opportunistic killing,” says wildlife researcher Kumar Paudel of Greenhood Nepal. “Often they are exploited by higher-ups in the ladder of organised crime.” Paudel filed a petition at the Supreme Court in 2018, and the Supreme Court five years later ordered the government to implement the law in a full, fair, and consistent manner. One of the indigenous communities is the semi-nomadic Chepang who have a long tradition of eating fruit bats. Dibesh Karmacharya of the Center of Molecular Dynamics Nepal in Kathmandu has been looking into new diseases for over a decade and a half, and this community in Makwanpur next to Chitwan National Park was selected. “Bats are known to carry viruses and bacteria, which are not harmful to them, but when humans get exposed the microbes can mutate and become pathogens with high transmissibility,” explains Karmacharya, who found that many Chepang had been imprisoned for poaching.&nbsp; “Indigenous communities are often disenfranchised and at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and need some kind of income,” says Karmacharya. “They are hunter-gatherers and have knowledge of the land as well as wildlife, so they get recruited by wildlife traffickers often getting caught, and not those who hire them.” CLIMATE FACTOR Global warming has meant that vectors that carry pathogens, as well as animals, are also moving to higher altitudes. As temperature rises, glaciers melt, and previously barren slopes have vegetation. Many mammals, such as common leopards, which are found in the foothills are moving up the mountains to share the habitat of snow leopards. Tigers have also been known to move out of Tarai national parks to seek cooler climes in the Mahabharata Range. Besides the risk of being caught, indigenous communities also are exposed to disease when they handle wildlife and harvest organs. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was speculation that the virus had jumped from pangolins to humans, which has since been disproven. Even so, pangolins are the world’s most trafficked mammal. The scales of the anteater are thought to have medical properties and are used in traditional Chinese medicine in China, as well as eaten as a delicacy in parts of Asia. Tulshi Laxmi Suwal of the Small Mammals Conservation and Research Foundation (SMCRF), who did her PhD on pangolins from Taiwan, says there is a link between climate, increased human-wildlife contact, and emerging diseases. “Climate change is directly affecting their food and habitat,” explains Suwal. “Pangolins need a lot of water and if they don’t get it ectoparasites under their scales might be easily released to their surroundings. But water is becoming scarcer with climate breakdown.”&nbsp; Researcher Kumar Paudel says law enforcement must be driven not so much by the total number of traffickers arrested, but by the goal of discouraging people from participating in the trade. This means fair and accountable implementation of the law so that indigenous people are not disproportionately impacted.&nbsp; Some ring leaders involved in tiger and rhino poaching have been arrested, but a handful of them staged jailbreaks during the September GenZ protests and are again at large — raising the risk that poaching may increase.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260114100128_e7a6891c2980aa132dd3e4644b752008bd367dd6e868790d4dbae5aa626a2764.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20260114100128_e7a6891c2980aa132dd3e4644b752008bd367dd6e868790d4dbae5aa626a2764" data-rendition-name="original" width="1500" height="1000" loading="lazy" alt="rhino"> <figcaption>Two greater one-horned rhinoceroses at Chitwan National Park in Nepal. Photo: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS</figcaption> </figure>  “Investigation must move to the upper echelons of the trade,” says Paudel. “And indigenous people need alternative livelihoods and education so they are not easily recruited to hunt down wildlife.”&nbsp; The solution may lie in small, local incentives that can help communities realise the importance of conservation while also empowering them, socially and economically. One such example is the Pangolin Trail in Bagh Bhairav Community Forest in Kirtipur near Kathmandu. After their study found the community forest to be a habitat for pangolins and endangered bird species, SMCRF built a trekking trail which has since been handed over to the local community which can get income from visitor fees. The local government has expanded the trail, added an information center, and runs clean-up campaigns. This gave the local Tamang community of 100 households a sense of ownership and agency. Local villagers have been trained to become citizen scientists, and help in recording pangolin behaviour. One of them is Sun Laxmi Pakhrin, who is not formally educated, but works in pangolin protection using GPS tracking systems and camera traps.&nbsp; A community previously notorious for theft, drug trafficking and wildlife poaching is now reformed. Families are also involved in small businesses such as poultry. Suwal says: “Women in indigenous communities are now in decision-making roles and the guardians of nature and wildlife.” With contribution from Qian Sun, Global Voices.

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