<h5>Through their enthusiastic lenses, nature film-makers introduced Nepal to a global audience</h5> <img width="640" height="489" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022110710118/6368cb009c7e80680e02f349jpeg.jpg" alt=""/>Götz Dieter Plage (above) drove into our lives in one of those iconic early Range Rovers, a red one if I remember right, bristling with all the latest gadgets. His arrival in Nepal heralded a decade-long partnership with our Tiger Tops team and UK’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/jan/30/broadcasting1">Survival Anglia</a> television, making a series of wildlife documentaries throughout South Asia.With lush brown hair and a brow wrinkled with seriousness, Dieter was an earnest German wildlife cameraman, much respected by his peers. Based in Chitwan in a synergistic deal brokered by <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=15828#.Wt1GGhuFO71">Jim Edwards</a>, Dieter experimented with the latest 1970s technology for innovative filmmaking in the wild –night scopes, image intensifiers, motor drives, steady cams, and even a single-engine aircraft.Fresh from filming in Africa, he regaled us with hair-raising stories about close encounters with endangered animals, charging gorillas and marauding hippos. Around the circular river-stone fireplace of a Lodge evening, he laughed loudly at his own jokes before retiring early to tinker with his equipment. In 1977 this pedantic loner surprised us by turning up with a wife (Mary from Norwich always known as “Sweetie Pie”) who faithfully followed Dieter’s peripatetic and obsessive shooting schedule with doe-eyed devotion. <figure><img width="640" height="409" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022110710118/6368cb039c7e80680e02f34ajpeg.jpg" alt=""><figcaption> </figcaption></figure> The facilities at <a href="http://www.tigertops.com/">Tiger Tops</a> were the perfect base for Survival’s team which typically took over two years to complete their carefully crafted one-hour documentaries.Dieter’s long-term camera assistants came in different shapes and sizes, becoming an integral part of our Chitwan routine – a short stocky one was a special friend of mine and a tall bearded one married my sister.All displayed an infectious commitment to the natural world and went to great lengths to capture rare and authentic footage, sitting for days in canvas hides, hours on elephant back, or perched all night on a tree branch.www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbAY44PN_oThrough their enthusiastic lenses, the secret splendours of the forest and wilderness were exquisitely revealed to a television audience of millions. Conservation concerns were a recurrent theme - tigers and rhinos in Chitwan, leopards in <a href="http://www.dudhwanationalpark.in/about-dudhwa-park.php">Dudhwa</a> and elephants in Sri Lanka.Mike Price was a balding and bouncy Brit, diminutive and dedicated. Night after night he sat in the camouflaged machan set high on the ridge beside a tiger-likely trail, waiting with his camera ready. Each morning he would return for breakfast, weary and despondent - until the day when he appeared, still gasping and hopping with excitement. It was May, and his bare legs were caked in sweat and dust, the heavy camera case slung across his khaki shoulders.When he had calmed down enough for us to understand him, Mike described the thrill of a tiger appearing silently out of the grass on the path below him - “stripes that moved” in the dawn light. At last, patience rewarded. It was a young male, and with the camera running he realised with some alarm that the purring sound was making it curious – the striped ears flickered with interest as it advanced up the bank. Mike had to remove the camera from the tripod as the tiger came closer and closer, until its face was peering through the slit window of the hide, separated only by a flimsy wall of canvas. <figure><img width="640" height="439" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022110710118/6368cb059c7e80680e02f34bjpeg.jpg" alt=""><figcaption> </figcaption></figure>Even though primeval instinctual terror made his heart race, Mike had the presence of mind to keep the camera going, his hands shaking. “I was deafened by my own heartbeats,” he said later. In a career of close shaves in the jungle, this unsteady sequence became the centrepiece of Tiger Tiger, one of the first films to document the behaviour of these noble and elusive nocturnal cats.As Mike recounted the story to us from the safety of the Tiger Tops breakfast table, luckily for him the young tiger decided discretion was the better part of curiosity, and moved on.In return for logistic support and movies to share with our guests and staff, the partnership with Survival Anglia gave Nepal conservation credibility and accessed global groups such as the Audubon Society, Frankfurt Zoo and Zoological Society of London.David Attenborough came, the BBC Natural History Unit and National Geographic. The integrity and international standing of Nepal’s wildlife conservation programme was secured.  <figure><img width="640" height="409" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022110710118/6368cb089c7e80680e02f34cjpeg.jpg" alt=""><figcaption> </figcaption></figure>The Smithsonian Institution’s long-term tiger monitoring project used Chuck McDougal and Tiger Tops’ trackers to pioneer camera trapping and radio collaring techniques, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands brought members of his 1001 Club of WWF donors as the guests of then-Prince Gyanendra, and Sir Peter Scott “launched” the first gharial back into the Narayani River, reared by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation to reinstate this threatened fish-eating crocodile. The first batch of gharial eggs was hatched in my bedroom, the white translucent orbs packed into a warm wet sandbox, before the crocodile breeding centre was set up at Kasara park headquarters.In a poignant footnote, exactly 25 years ago this month Dieter Plage was killed in a horrific accident, plunging 50m through the canopy of a remote Sumatran rainforest. Hovering above the trees, he was suspended below a small airship in an adapted camera platform when his safety harness failed -- a victim of his own inventive commitment to share the glories of Asia’s natural world.Read Also: <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/regular-columns/So-far-so-good/son-of-the-famous,945">Sons of the famous</a>, Lisa Choegyal<a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/Nepali-Times-Buzz/Charles-McDougal-passes-away-at-86,3034">Charles McDougal</a>, Lisa Choegyal<a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/regular-columns/So-far-so-good/bardiya-beginnings-Lisa-Choegyal,1085">Bardiya beginnings</a> ,Lisa Choegyal

Lisa Choegyal

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Survival survivors

Samsung Nepal has opened pre-orders for the Galaxy A57 5G and A37 5G. Both phones run Samsung’s One UI 8.5, featuring AI capabilities like voice transcription, Circle to Search, and photo editing. They feature a 50MP triple-camera system, a Super AMOLED display, and six years of OS and security updates.

Galaxy A series

The war in West Asia has exposed the fragility of the economic architecture Nepal has built on over two generations. If the conflict continues, growth across developing Asia will slow and prices will rise. For Nepal, this will be felt through higher living costs, weaker economic activity, and growing uncertainty for the millions of families who depend on remittances.&nbsp; Nepal now needs to structurally transform from exporting labour to investing in domestic job creation. &nbsp; The country's current path toward a knowledge economy has a blind spot. A <a href="https://iids.org.np/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/unleashing.pdf" target="_blank">report</a> by the Institute for Integrated Development Studies (IIDS) in Kathmandu shows that IT export companies alone generated 7,228 jobs and income for 66,509 freelancers.&nbsp; We are building digital labour export, not an economy that accumulates institutional knowledge. The Nepali Upwork developer and a migrant construction worker in the Gulf are engaged in the same economic activity, but with different tools. Nepal’s reliance on a <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?locations=NP" target="_blank">remittance-driven economy,</a> means the country has failed to create enough <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/nepal/publication/unlocking-nepal-s-growth-potential" target="_blank">quality jobs</a> at home. For millions of young people, leaving the country is not a choice but a necessity to survive and support families back home. <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/nepal/publication/unlocking-nepal-s-growth-potential" target="_blank">Remittances</a> have no doubt helped reduce poverty. Thirty years ago, 55% of Nepal’s population lived on less than $2.15 a day, now it is 20% after the absolute poverty line was revised upwards. This progress has come at a cost — &nbsp;an economy that depends more on exporting workers than creating opportunities at home. This development reflects a deeper political failure to create meaningful jobs within the country. Since the democratic transition in 1991, Nepal’s leadership has largely recycled the same faces, with limited progress on job creation or industrial growth.&nbsp; Nepal cannot build a <a href="https://nipore.org/accelerating-nepals-startups/" target="_blank">knowledge economy</a> while its most ambitious people are outbound to Doha and Tokyo. We are also not just losing ‘labour’. We are losing the entrepreneurial risk tolerance of our youth.&nbsp; If the most ambitious 25-year-olds are abroad, who is left to support innovation and entrepreneurship? The same people who are working tirelessly abroad, are our biggest asset for development. Their work ethic and the know-how inurban renewal could well fit into the new RSP government’s mandate of 7% annual growth.&nbsp; The <a href="https://english.biznessnews.com/posts/-nepal%E2%80%99s-it-exports-cross-1-billion-" target="_blank">$1B milestone</a> of IT exports is a celebratory moment for Nepal. However, that cannot lead to a pathway to a $100 billion economy without innovation ecosystems that go beyond individual labour export. Companies like SecurityPal and industry associations such as NASIT have made significant efforts in building such an environment, recently championed by private sector leaders as a &nbsp;<a href="https://www.securitypalhq.com/blog/silicon-peaks" target="_blank">Silicon Peaks</a> model that emphasises a home growth tech cluster. The need to accelerate this transition is even more urgent with the escalating conflict in West Asia. &nbsp;The recent International Labour Organisation (ILO) <a href="https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/Nepal%20LDC%20Graduation%20Employment%20Impacts%20Report.pdf" target="_blank">report</a> shows that LDC graduation is expected to adversely impact manufacturing with losses of $1 billion by 2030.&nbsp; If manufacturing takes such a large hit from losing trade preferences, then Nepal’s services and IT sectors need to structurally transform and shift from exporting individual talent to building firms. &nbsp; A generation’s frustration has finally forced a shift in Nepal’s political structure, handing the new government a clear mandate to fix failures. But the question still persists: what prevents Nepal from achieving sustained, productivity-driven growth? &nbsp;&nbsp; RSP is in the right place at the right time to put Nepal's economy on a firm footing. At the heart of Nepal’s economic underperformance lies a major development binding constraint: low returns to investment on projects.&nbsp; The government invests like a high-growth economy, with gross capital formation at around <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.GDI.FTOT.ZS?locations=NP" target="_blank">25–30 percent of GDP</a>. Yet economic growth remains modest. The problem is not how much the country invests, but how little it gets in return. One way to see this is by looking at how much investment is required to generate growth.&nbsp; Nepal needs large amounts of capital to produce relatively small gains in output (graph, below). For instance, in 2024, the ICOR was 8.29, this suggests that Nepal had to invest more than 8 units of capital to produce a one unit of additional economic output.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260406040412_605dc527641d2ff2dc5723ed8bbec946898331d5538a55b9941e32a0725bf811.jpg" data-media-id="editor_9" data-image-id="20260406040412_605dc527641d2ff2dc5723ed8bbec946898331d5538a55b9941e32a0725bf811" data-rendition-name="original" width="1827" height="925" loading="lazy" alt="Economy graph"> <figcaption>Source: Author's calculation based on a Growth Diagnostic simulation</figcaption> </figure>  This reflects a deeper issue in how investment is allocated and executed. Capital is often locked in low-productivity sectors or diluted by delays, inefficiencies, and policy uncertainty.&nbsp; As a result, even high levels of investment fail to translate into sustained growth. Until investment shifts toward productive, firm-building activities, higher spending alone will not deliver results. &nbsp; To reverse this, the government must focus on raising the returns to investment by enabling firms to grow and compete. This requires a shift from managing scarcity to creating an environment where capital can generate consistent and predictable returns. A central priority should be given to attracting and retaining both domestic and foreign private investment. Investors do not just respond to direct incentives, but also to policy stability in the country. Nepal’s economy cannot sustain high growth if its human capital continues to leave the country.&nbsp; The goal should not simply be to create jobs, but to build companies that scale, innovate, and compete beyond Nepal. This requires supporting sectors with strong productivity potential and ensuring that firms can expand without being constrained by infrastructure gaps or regulatory friction. Finally, the state must improve the quality of its own investment. Public spending should focus on lowering the cost of doing business through reliable electricity, efficient logistics, and digital infrastructure.&nbsp; The GenZ movement took two days to bring change. The economic transformation of Nepal might take a generation. The RSP can accelerate this transition, but only if it focuses on building a better investment climate for business and not just feeding the global labour pool. Kailash Raj Pandey is an MPA/ID and MBA candidate at Harvard Kennedy School and MIT Sloan School of Management and a fellow at MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Innovation and Prosperity.&nbsp; Siddhartha Raymajhí is a policy researcher based in Kathmandu.

Creating a firm future for Nepal

Know your Ministers

Prime Minister Balendra Shah on Wednesday broke tradition and met with 17 foreign envoys collectively, a move that was a notable departure from how his predecessors operated.&nbsp;
Shah had already set himself apart by talking less, listening more, and delegating to trusted friends. But by meeting all ambassadors at one go in the presence of the Foreign Ministry, he signalled a paradigm shift in how he wants Nepal to be seen: no longer just balancing India and China, but as a country confident about its <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/opinion/guest-editorial/tripolar-contestation-over-nepal">strategic importance and place in the world</a>.
In just two weeks, the <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/news/rsp-dos-and-don-ts">RSP has sprung into action </a>on multiple fronts to implement its ambitious 100-point, 100-days action plan. It has taken short-term measures to mitigate the impact of the Gulf war, as well as medium- and long- term measures to streamline the bureaucracy. A few high-profile figures have been made examples of to drive the message home.
Earlier this week, the government recalled six politically appointed ambassadors, the most notable being long-serving Shankar Sharma from New Delhi. The Kathmandu District Court issued arrest warrants against former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and his former foreign minister wife Arzu Rana on charges of money laundering and corruption.
Each ministry has been trying to clean up the accumulated rot from the past three decades: regulatory overhaul of microfinance, education, health and service delivery.&nbsp;
These actions widely disseminated campaign-style on YouTube and TikTok have made most Nepalis hopeful that the party they installed in power means business.
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BACKLASH
But such attempts to overhaul a long-entrenched political culture were bound to face backlash. In their impatience and enthusiasm to get things done, some of Prime Minister Shah’s ministers have over-reached.
It was common knowledge that government-paid advertising in the mainstream press was kickback-driven, but the PMO’s directive that official notices be published or broadcast only on state-run media has been denounced — especially as the media industry struggles to stay afloat.
More serious are some recent appointments by ministers of relatives and figures closely associated with the RSP to key positions. This has rankled because this party built its political plank on ending nepotism and graft.&nbsp;
News that Home Minister Sudan Gurung allegedly had not paid rent on leased land, which illegally encroached on the lake in Pokhara did not help. &nbsp;
Prime Minister Shah himself has come under scrutiny for appointing a kitchen cabinet full of male buddies from his time as Kathmandu mayor. To douse criticism he brought in as adviser investigative journalist Deepa Dahal, who has exposed corruption in high places of the previous coalitions.&nbsp;
Shah’s appointment of another political adviser Asim Shah to the head Constitution Amendment Task Force, is also seen as problematic. He is a filmmaker and former lawmaker, but does not have a background in constitutional law.&nbsp;
Even more controversial is the Cabinet’s decision to appoint RSP Chair Rabi Lamichhane’s legal counsel, Narayan Kandel, as Attorney General. Kandel used to be a UK permanent resident, and does not have as much experience practicing law in Nepal.&nbsp;
Kandel’s appointment drew flak and raised eyebrows, and with the pending legal cases against Lamichhane this appointment represents a flagrant conflict of interest.
Health Minister Nisha Mehta was also accused of favouritism after reappointing Junu Shrestha, wife of Labour Minister Dipak Kumar Shah, as member of the Health Insurance Board which had earlier suspended her. The Labour Minister’s rambling rant at the Board’s meeting on Tuesday has not helped the RSP’s image.&nbsp;
(UPDATE: On Thursday, Prime Minister Shah sacked the Labour Minister after the RSP found him in breach of the party's code of conduct and discipline. He served 14 days in the Cabinet, one of the shortest tenures for a minister in Nepal )
It is hard to know what <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/news/ball-in-balen-s-court">Balendra Shah is thinking</a>, and how Rabi Lamichhane is going to justify some of these moves. After all, making politics, governance, and bureaucracy a meritocracy has been the core tenet of the RSP, and it risks alienating its mainly youth base if these missteps persist.
But at least for now, most RSP supporters seem to be giving the party the benefit of doubt.

frankfurt-zoo

Survival survivors

Galaxy A series

Creating a firm future for Nepal

Know your Ministers

Nepal’s new government springs into action