Nepal Now podcast

That is the sound of hundreds of students at Tilingatar High School in Tokha Municipality lining up for their midday meal of rice and veggies. This still unfinished concrete school of 1,100 students on the urban edge of the Kathmandu Valley is one among tens of thousands of government schools country wide that serve hot meals to their students. In two more years the midday meal programme (known here as diya khaja) will feed children in all 77 districts, after the remaining 6 districts...

Duration:00:10:56

Today is the first episode in our new series, Nepal Then and Now, where we’ll talk with former guests and catch up on their work and lives. We created the series partly in response to feedback we got in our recent survey — that episodes were too long. If you are one of the listeners who felt that way — or even if you’re not! — please let us know what you think about this approach. I’m really happy that our first guest in the series is filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar. Yes, I consider him a friend...

Duration:00:17:54

One request before we get to today’s episode—we’ve created a short survey to get your feedback on the show. It’s just 4 questions, and according to Survey Monkey the average person takes just 2 minutes to fill it out, so it’s fast. I’ve pasted the link in the episode notes. Thanks to everyone who gives feedback. Ek Ek Paila (which means step by step in Nepali) was one of many initiatives started to provide emergency relief following the devastating earthquakes of 2015, which killed almost...

Duration:00:29:18

When I was thinking about the topic of today’s episode, veganism in Nepal, it seemed oddly out of place. It’s not that being vegan is new in Nepal—historically many Hindus and Buddhists have not eaten meat or dairy products—but I was associating veganism with the emerging movement in the west, which probably more than anything else reveals the overwhelming reach of western culture. Of course, the basic diet is the same, but there are similarities and differences, noted in my chat with Suresh...

Duration:00:26:21

As SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Jan 13th 2022, a group of friends took up positions on a rooftop in Kathmandu, laptops open, waiting for a signal. Inside Falcon 9 was the satellite they had spent years building, first as students and then working as engineers—Sanosat-1. The size and shape of a Rubik’s Cube, Sanosat was one of 106 satellites shuttled into space on the Falcon 9 then released into orbit to begin their various missions. 500 kilometres...

Duration:00:33:24

I’d been wanting to return to Chimling Village in the hills of Sindhupalchowk district since soon after my first visit in March 2021. That’s when I accompanied health workers to find out the status of women who had given birth recently, but had delivered their babies at home. In particular, I was curious about their experiences with misoprostol, a drug that’s given to pregnant women who might deliver without the support of a skilled birth attendant. The main cause of death in home deliveries...

Duration:00:13:55

Happy New Year and welcome to Nepal Now’s first episode of 2022. My name is Marty Logan. Please bear with the nostalgia that accompanies the new year: I still remember when the new millennia was a thing (and we all fretted about the impending cyber doom that would be delivered by the Y2K virus—until 12:01 am on January first 2000, when we sighed with relief after our computers booted up). Actually, my memories reach much further into the past—but that is for another time. Today we are...

Duration:00:33:49

I first thought about interviewing today’s guest soon after I saw her Instagram channel when, I must say, I was shocked by some of its contents. We finally spoke last week, and I was certainly impressed by what I heard. We’ll get to our chat in a minute, but first a quick word about this podcast. The feedback we’ve received about Nepal Now in the past 18 months has all been positive, but frankly we’ve haven’t yet hit a point where this work is sustainable. Simply put — we need more...

Duration:00:37:16

Welcome to Nepal Now. My name is Marty Logan. Looking back on the early days of my relationship with Nepal, I see that it took me far too long to realise that this is a country of incredible diversity of cultures and peoples. Today I can understand why — the face of Nepal is very much upper-caste, Hindu, male and Nepali speaking. Yet roughly a third of the country’s nearly 30 million people belong to about 100 Indigenous groups, 60 of them officially recognized. Surprisingly, you hear very...

Duration:00:42:01

Before we start, a warning: This episode discusses rape and might be disturbing for some listeners. Kriti was raped regularly by her father and grandfather from the age of nine. When she was 15 she was finally able to report the violence at the police station in Dhulikhel, near Kathmandu. The legal term for rape in Nepali is a mouthful: ja-bar-jas-ti-ka-ra-ni. When a police officer, a woman, at the police station asked Kriti to recall the first time she was raped, she didn’t understand. She...

Duration:00:25:26

I’ve lived in Nepal for over a decade now, and I’m still astonished to see where, and what, Nepalis worship. Temples and shrines are mostly obvious—sometimes because roads or sidewalks will curve sharply to avoid them—but as I’m walking through my neighborhood I might spot a smudge of auspicious vermillion powder on a tree trunk, a tiny niche in a cement wall, or even on a sidewalk. That is why I was not surprised when today’s guest, Roshan Mishra of Taragaon Museum and the Global Nepali...

Duration:00:29:29

In less than a month COP26 will have begun. Because of the shocking and destructive fires, floods, droughts and other climate disasters worldwide in the past year, it’s a good guess that more people than ever will focus on the global climate meeting in the UK. How much will the leaders of the richest and most polluting countries promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, and how much money will they pledge to poorer countries to adapt to the new, dangerous climate...

Duration:00:31:23

Vaccines, vaccines, vaccines. This is what I’m talking and reading about these days when the subject is Covid-19. I’ve had my jab, and so has my wife, but my daughter, who’s under 18, has not, because Nepal hasn’t offered them to that age group yet, but she still has to go to school this week to take exams. My parents in Canada, who are over 80, have had two jabs, and now they’re talking about a booster shot. And on it goes. But here in Nepal only 20% of people are fully vaccinated and 22%...

Duration:00:27:55

Unfortunately, Nepal’s universities do not, in general, enjoy good reputations. Politicization is a main reason for that. But a new institution, University of Nepal, plans to avoid that pitfall by establishing itself as a public university, governed by a board of trustees. More importantly, says today’s guest and member of the development board, Dovan Rai, UoN will offer a liberal arts education. Graduates will be equipped to deal with a broad range of future challenges, not only those...

Duration:00:28:30

Hi. This is Marty Logan. I wanted to let you know that I’m hosting a new podcast for IPS News. It’s called Strive: Toward a more just, sustainable world. It’s about people everywhere who are taking action to address climate change, racism, inequality and many other challenges we all face today. One thing that I think makes Strive different is we’ll be discussing solutions, not just adding to your burden by detailing the problems. Our first episode looked at how civil society in South Asia is...

Duration:00:32:45

Nepalis are online. Full stop. We can no longer say that Nepalis in cities are online, or that educated Nepalis are online. In a 2020 survey, 89% of Nepalis said that they used Facebook. 62% of the mobile phones that people carried around were smartphones, and the figure was growing. The Covid-19 pandemic has surely caused it to rise further. This has huge implications for many aspects of people’s lives. In this episode I talk about a number of those with Shubha Kayastha of Body & Data. Do...

Duration:00:39:48

Room to Read works with more than 4,400 high school-age girls in three districts in Nepal. During the Covid-19 lockdown from April to July 2020, 53% of those girls were unsure about returning to their school when it reopened. They were scared about the pandemic, their families were feeling the economic crunch, and they had already missed months of school in their final years of education so it would be easy to not return. The organization knew it had to react, says Salina Tamang, Girls.

Duration:00:31:18

It’s monsoon season here in Nepal. And every time it pours rain, as it’s doing now, I start worrying about flooding. It can happen here in Kathmandu but usually the worst occurs in the southern Madhesh region, when swollen rivers spill over their banks and inundate villages, or in Nepal’s hill districts, when incessant rain dislodges fragile slopes and landslides demolish buildings and block roads. Climate change is reshaping the monsoon, resulting in greater numbers of extreme weather...

Duration: 00:30:57

Welcome to Nepal Now. My name is Marty Logan. As we’re recording this, there is news that landslides and flooding have battered some of Nepal’s hill districts. Our hearts go out to the people who have suffered the loss of lives and their homes. This is a bad sign as the monsoon has just started and will continue for months. Today’s episode is also about nature, and also concerns the people-environment link. A much more positive story, it is about Dev Narayan Mandal’s determination to stop...

Duration:00:34:09

As you've likely heard, Nepal is in the throes of a second wave of Covid-19. This has raised fears that, just like during and after the lockdown of 2020, women will be using reproductive, maternal and child health services much less than usual, or as necessary. One result is likely to be more births taking place in risky home settings. Today, we’re going on the road to visit two such homes. We set out to track what seemed to be a magic pill used to protect pregnant women, but the trip...

Duration: 00:18:53

I just checked two popular online fundraising platforms and very quickly found more than 130 campaigns raising money for Covid-19 relief in Nepal. Nepalis and non-Nepalis alike are rallying to gather donations for oxygen, isolation centres, food and other daily needs, and much more to fight the devastating second wave, which is slowly seeping into villages. Leading the way is a group of people who, one year ago, were better known as victims of Covid-19: migrant workers from Nepal who were...

Duration: 00:28:22

These are terrible, painful days for many people in Nepal, and so I hesitated to post this episode. But then I thought, in the midst of the devastation and death caused by Covid-19 it is important to hear something positive and, in this case, not something cheery just for the sake of diverting our attention, like cat videos on social media. Rather, in today’s episode we’re talking about a positive, rising trend: the number of Nepalis who are reaching greater heights, both real — like the...

Duration: 00:34:46

Today is Thursday, April 29th. A few hours ago we started a second lockdown here in the Kathmandu Valley in response to a frightening rise in the number of Covid-19 cases. I’ve read reports that the intensive care units of many hospitals are full and projections that the number of cases in Nepal is growing faster than in neighbouring India, which of course has been devastated in recent days. Lockdown here basically means that except for food shops and...

Duration: 00:33:15

In a country where mental health is often talked about in whispers — if it’s discussed at all — I was surprised, and happy, to recently see a photo of a new counselling room set up in a high school. It is one of two rooms established in schools in Melamchi, close to Kathmandu. Other rooms should be completed in coming months in Baglung District, says my guest on today’s episode, Ranjita Maharjan from Sambhavya Foundation. The three-year-old organization is already counselling students in 13...

Duration: 00:31:59

Santosh Shah is a household name in Nepal after finishing runner-up on MasterChef. Sanjog Thakuri’s father was cooking the daily meals for his family decades ago, so it was natural for the son to grow up helping in the kitchen. But as a teenager, when he wanted to talk about cooking while his friends teased local girls he himself became a target for not being macho enough. Today, Sanjog talks to boys and men about how much better their lives, and society as a whole, would be if they didn’t...

Duration: 00:36:34

How do Nepalis put up with this government; they’re too patient! is a statement I’ve repeated regularly in the 15 years that I’ve been linked to this country. In fact, in 1990 and 2006 the people had had enough and launched movements, or revolutions, that contributed to dramatic redesigns of the country: in 1990, the return to democracy and in 2006, the creation of a republic that included Maoist rebels who had just signed a ceasefire. Earlier this year a third movement was born after the...

Duration: 00:36:56

Building back better. The green recovery. Sustainable transformation. It seems I’ve been reading those phrases time and again during the past pandemic year. And sometimes I wonder if they’re just attempts to find a bright spot amid the devastation of Covid-19. Or are they a sincere recognition that something fundamental must change if we humans want to continue living life on this planet as we’ve known it till now? I must admit that I’m scared for the future that my daughter and her friends...

Duration: 00:28:39

When I first moved to Nepal 16 years ago every few years I would read a report in the daily newspaper about the road network reaching a remote village. The driver and passengers would have garlands of marigolds draped around their necks, red tika pressed to their foreheads, and a celebration would follow. The reason was simple: most people were confident that more roads would bring more development. Today’s guest has first-hand knowledge of the road-building phenomenon...

Duration: 00:35:30

Nearly 200 countries, Nepal included, are scheduled to meet in Scotland in November to discuss how to respond to climate change. One of the items on the agenda will be how much money wealthier countries will commit to transferring to so-called developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to ‘green’ their own economies. Notably, rich countries haven’t come anywhere close to meeting their $100-billion-dollar pledge for 2020, an amount that they promised to provide yearly...

Duration: 00:35:48

Advocates for women were excited last year when they heard that changes were coming to Nepal’s rape law, which has long been criticized as ineffective. On this show we spoke to youth activists who had met with the attorney general and other lawmakers and were energized and excited by the process. But when the ordinance containing the revisions was signed by the president, not all of the rumoured improvements were there. Left out was removal of the statute of limitations that says a rape...

Duration: 00:20:39

To its credit the Nepali media has written regularly about successive governments’ lack of action on transitional justice since the Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed in 2006. Reporting has focused on the legal framework, which in 2015 Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled must be revised because it granted amnesty for the most serious crimes of the conflict. In the civil war, from 1996 to 2006, the state and Maoists combined to kill 17,000 Nepalis, torturing and disappearing thousands more...

Duration: 00:32:17

I’ve followed human rights issues for much of my career. I even worked for the UN human rights office in Nepal soon after the civil war ended in the mid-2000s. Back then, Nepal’s own human rights commission was quite insular, focused on overcoming the huge challenges around the conflict using the few resources it had available in a sometimes hostile environment. I left Nepal for 6 years and when I returned in 2016 I was surprised to see that the commission had a much louder voice, at least...

Duration: 00:38:20

‘The rapist is you’. On October 10th a group of about 20 young women dressed in black took over a street in Kathmandu pointed straight ahead accusingly, and performed the anti-rape song ‘A rapist in your path’. The ‘flash mob’ was protesting what feels like an epidemic of rape in the country. In recent months it seems that every week the media is reporting another violent incident, often against adolescent girls, too often ending in murder. ‘Ajhai kati sahane?’ (How much more must we...

Duration: 00:35:13

In 2019, 19-year-old girls in Nepal were the third shortest in the world, found a recent study by the journal The Lancet that ranked 200 countries. That’s not simply a genetic thing: ‘Nepalis are short’. A third of adolescent boys and girls in Nepal — 1.8 million — are stunted, or too short for their age. Others are too thin for their age, or wasted. These various forms of undernutrition contribute to 25,000 child deaths in Nepal each year, or 52 per cent of child deaths, more than any...

Duration: 00:39:14

Rukshana Kapali is a firebrand. At 21 she is leading efforts to change Nepal’s laws so they include transgender men and women, and spearheading work to develop terminology in Nepali, and Nepal bhasa (or Newa language), that is inclusive of people who identify anywhere along the gender spectrum. She has led campaigns to protect lands of Kathmandu Valley’s Indigenous Newa people and has joined heritage activists to ensure that an ancient, sacred pond in the centre of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu...

Duration: 00:36:46

I liked Mithila painting the very first time that I saw it. The bright colours and village scenes amid lush jungles and bountiful nature really appealed to me, although nostalgically I now realize. So I was shocked the first time I saw paintings done by today’s guest. Although they featured the same vibrant colours and verdant backdrops, one example showed two women kissing under a tree and another depicted a woman standing and bleeding profusely during her period. But my shock soon wore...

Duration: 00:29:07

Anyone who lives in Nepal knows about caste and untouchability — the social rules that slot people into rigid groups from which they can rarely escape. At the bottom of the caste hierarchy are the Dalits, previously known as untouchables. Anyone living in Nepal would be aware of the deadly, violent crimes committed against Dalits, almost always with no legal consequences. (Since I recorded this episode at least two Dalit girls have been raped and murdered.) But as you will hear in my...

Duration: 00:35:09

As a developing country Nepal has few resources to devote to climate change. But as of late last year it has started to receive money from something called the Green Climate Fund to both reduce its own emissions and adapt to climate change. So far $73 million has been earmarked from the Fund for two projects. But who decides how that money is spent? Today we’re talking with Tunga Rai from the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities, or NEFIN. He thinks that climate change projects need...

Duration: 00:53:33

I obviously don’t know if it’s harder to be a woman in Nepal than in other places, but often it seems like it must be. Around 1,200 women here die each year giving birth, many from a simple post-delivery haemorrhage. (The fact that no one seems to know the exact number speaks volumes about the importance officialdom places on the issue). Tens of thousands of other women endure the condition known as uterine prolapse — where the uterus descends towards or through the vagina, the result of,...

Duration: 01:00:16

Deepak Rauniyar still feels queasy when he remembers the racism he faced growing up in Udaypur district in eastern Nepal. As one of few dark-skinned kids in the community, whose mother tongue was not Nepali, he was taunted by children and singled out for beatings by his headmaster. But as a college student looking for part-time work he soon discovered that journalism gave him the power to uncover the discrimination that pervaded life in the southern Madhesh region. He later honed those...

Duration: 01:21:42

According to one of today’s guests, 1 in 5 working age Nepalis is overseas for employment at any one time. In 2019, the earnings sent home by these workers, known as remittances, totalled about $US8 billion, or 25% of Nepal’s gross domestic product, the economic value of its output. COVID-19 hammered labour migration, and the lives of many Nepalis. Some remain stuck in countries far from home, jobless after being cast aside when local economies tanked and the Nepal government refused to let...

Duration: 00:58:17

There’s no doubt that today COVID-19 is the main issue in Nepal and in most parts of the world, so I decided when I started planning this podcast that it would be the subject of the first episode. But I also knew that I didn’t want to discuss the daily news — case numbers, quarantine centres, equipment shortages, government mismanagement, etc. Instead, because this podcast is all about examining issues in Nepal with an eye to doing things differently and contributing to change, I wanted to...

Duration: 00:51:14

COVID-19 arrived in Nepal at the end of January, but it was really only in May when it hit, as tens of thousands of migrant workers started arriving home from neighbouring India. As in many other countries, rich and poor, the pandemic has accentuated Nepal’s fault lines, including its health system, inequality and poor governance. And just as in other countries, the time seems ripe to question the direction that Nepal was taking. That’s where this podcast comes in — to ask, Can things be...

Duration: 00:03:59

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