They came in broad daylight, the police and their bulldozers, on the afternoon of November 28, 2022. Their orders were to destroy the makeshift houses and evict the people living on public property along the banks of the Bagmati River in the Thapathali section of Kathmandu. As word spread, the people of this long-established slum community of perhaps a thousand—families with children, poor and landless, many having lived there for decades—grabbed stones, bricks, bamboo poles, and whatever else they could to resist the machinery of the state. Squaring off against hundreds of police where the thoroughfare of Shiva Marg meets the riverbank, they fought in the street—injuring about two dozen police personnel, three seriously, according to the city government.
A decade earlier, in May 2012, the government had sent more than a thousand security personnel and managed to demolish 251 structures in the Thapathali settlement, despite fierce resistance, in an attempt to evict the community by overwhelming force. For the most part, that effort failed. People rebuilt, though the settlement is smaller now. This time, the residents were determined to protect their homes: improvised structures, simple yet dignified, made of cement blocks, plywood, bamboo, sheet plastic, and corrugated metal, crammed together on either side of the settlement’s single, unpaved lane. And this time the police, bruised and bleeding, fell back. The crowd facing them grew, and its ranks swelled with people from other informal settlements who came running to their defense in solidarity, forming barricades with their bodies. The bulldozers retreated, at least for the time being.
The struggle was far from over. Nepal’s national government stepped in to mediate a solution to the issue of informal settlements, or “squatter” communities, along the Bagmati River corridor, but Kathmandu’s demagogic and authoritarian mayor, Balendra Shah, playing to moneyed interests and the desire to “clean up” the city, was uncooperative despite strong condemnations of the mayor’s forceful policies by human-rights advocates and interventions by the courts. And so, the stalemate continued.
“From a human-rights perspective, forced eviction is a state-sponsored crime,” said Nirajan Thapaliya, director of Amnesty International Nepal, when I spoke to him about the Thapathali eviction struggle. “If eviction is to be carried out for the larger public benefit and the benefit of the community there—for example, to rescue them from a risk situation or uplift them from poverty—it has to be done with the full participation and consultation of the affected community.”
“There are people who have been living there for years,” Thapaliya continued. “Children, women, people with disabilities, older people, very disadvantaged people. They have their property there. They have built a structure, they have beds, kitchenware, everything. That is a house for them—that they have built.”
It’s not clear exactly how many people live in the informal settlements of Kathmandu Valley, but it’s a relatively small number compared with other major cities in South Asia. According to rights advocates, there are fifty-four settlements in the Valley with about five thousand households—perhaps fifty thousand human beings—in a swelling population of up to five or six million. What is clear is that informal settlements along the Bagmati River corridor stand in the way of lucrative riverfront real-estate development, along with a much-touted “beautification” effort known as the Bagmati River Basin Improvement Project, financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and slated for completion this year. Good for nearby property values—in the short run, perhaps.
But what is also clear is that the accelerating impacts of global warming threaten to make much of the Kathmandu Valley unlivable in the coming decades, starting with the areas closest to the rivers. And the ADB-financed development does little if anything to make the Bagmati corridor more resilient, in any significant way, to the ever-more damaging floods—the consequence of more intense and unpredictable extreme downpours in a concrete urban landscape that has overtaken the river’s ancient floodplain. (According to a 2023 study, the area of Kathmandu at high risk of severe flooding will likely double within two or three decades.) In fact, with all the new concrete poured along the river’s banks, the beautification project may have worsened the flooding already.
In any sane—and humane—world, the people in the informal settlements would be given the opportunity to move to higher ground, where they would be provided with safe and secure housing, and the floodplains of the Bagmati and the Kathmandu Valley’s other rivers would be restored as much as possible to make way for and absorb the flood waters. But such adaptation efforts, costly and disruptive, are nowhere to be seen. And what’s happening along the Bagmati River—the struggle between human rights and unchecked, profit-driven growth—is just one aspect of the many-faceted crisis into which Kathmandu and Nepal as a whole are headed, like so many other places in the Global South, as chaotic urbanization, economic and political inequality, and an accelerating climate catastrophe converge.
Fighting for Survival
I visited the Thapathali settlement in late January 2024, fourteen months after its second eviction battle was fought. With me was Bhagavati Adhikari, the energetic thirty-six-year-old executive director of Nepal Mahila Ekata Samaj (NMES), a grassroots organization with a network of more than fifty-seven thousand landless women living in informal settlements across fifteen districts of Nepal which advocates for their rights under the Constitution of 2015 (and international human rights standards) to adequate housing. I had contacted Adhikari with the help of ActionAid Nepal, and she would be my guide and translator. Her family had lived in another of Kathmandu’s nearby informal settlements when she was a teenager. She was on familiar terrain.
“The river enters the house, up to three or four feet.”
We arrived midmorning on a sunny winter day. It was the dry season, with Kathmandu’s winters becoming drier still as the climate changes, and the Bagmati, the Kathmandu Valley’s principal and most sacred river, was down to a foul, shallow trickle, mainly sewage, in the weed-and-garbage-strewn riverbed a short stone’s throw from where we stood. I witnessed the Thapathali settlement in a relatively pleasant and livable season. All was calm, quiet, and dry. Those residents, young and old, who weren’t off at a job—unemployment is rampant—went about their morning tasks, tended small children, or sat in pairs or small groups in the sun (though subtropical, at more than 4,500 feet above sea level Kathmandu’s nights are chilly in winter). Adhikari led me down the settlement’s long central lane until we stopped at one of the houses on the side farthest from the river. The houses on the other side of the lane back straight up to the riverbed, practically overhanging the retaining wall and the strip of embankment below.
Adhikari ducked into the low doorway, and I followed her down a dim, narrow hallway of bare plywood, out through a tiny kitchen-bedroom at the back, and into a tight open-air space with a few stones for a cooking fire on the packed earth. Another makeshift bed, on which vegetable greens were spread, was set against the wall of the adjoining house.
Our host, fifty-seven-year-old Januka Pokhrel, a member of the NMES activist network, greeted us and offered two low stools next to the dormant fire. She sat across from us in a blue fleece, a long necklace of red beads, loose red leggings, and a traditional apron-style skirt in a colorfully patterned weave. A red bindi graced her forehead. Her broad face was deeply lined, her eyes gentle, her expression stoic yet friendly, apparently at ease with this meeting.
I asked Pokhrel how long she’d lived there.
“Almost nineteen years,” she told us. Originally from the eastern part of Nepal, she came to Kathmandu when she was eighteen, looking for work and a better life. But she couldn’t afford rent and wasn’t able to survive, she said, until she realized that she could stay in the riverside areas.
When she moved to the Thapathali settlement nearly two decades ago, Pokhrel recalled, it was still during the Maoist insurgency and civil war of 1996–2006, and there was a lot of discussion about communism, how the people’s lives were going to be easier. “Those people who are poor and vulnerable,” she said, “their homes, their livelihoods, everything would be ensured by the new government and the Maoists.” So, she stayed, hoping that life was going to change.
Pokhrel is the mother of seven grown children, four daughters and three sons, and another son who died. One of her sons, like so many young Nepalis, went abroad to find work. He used to call her sometimes from Malaysia, but he was no longer in contact. “Maybe he’s struggling there too,” she said.
“The government says you can’t live here anymore,” I said. “So, if you can’t live here, where would you live?”
“The government should provide me with a small house,” she said, well aware of her rights under the Constitution. “I don’t want a bigger one.” And it should be in a safe place where there are jobs, she told us, where her livelihood options are open.
Pokhrel explained that she used to be a manual laborer, but after the eviction battle in November 2022, she had joined the large demonstrations against the city government’s land policy and the arrests of community members. She was on the streets protesting for twenty-nine straight days, as well as testifying in court, and as a result she lost her job. Now she works for a small community group in the Thapathali settlement, helping provide meals for children. She’s paid eight thousand Nepali rupees (about $60) per month. Adhikari asked her how she and the community get through them. “I’m surviving,” Pokhrel said.
When I asked her about the floods and how she and the community survive them, she told us that the floods have grown worse. Now, “every year there is a flood. The river enters the house, up to three or four feet. That is normal. The utensils float here,” she said, gesturing around us. She keeps food items in a high-up space for protection or hangs them from the ceiling. During the intense rains, no one sleeps. They have to stay awake all night because the floods can come without warning. People in the community have had to be rescued from the surging waters.
In 2011, she recalled, there was a huge flood. She couldn’t protect any of her belongings; everything was lost. She herself felt lost, she told us. “How can I manage?” A year later, the bulldozers came for the first time. “I didn’t have a chance to take a single spoon from my house,” she said. “It was totally destroyed.” That was when she asked herself, “Why do I exist in this society?”
I asked her if there is a sense of solidarity, an ethos of mutual aid, among her neighbors in the settlement, especially when the floods come.
“There is a high level of unity,” Pokhrel said. When there is a flood, they support each other, she told me. “If there are pregnant women, maternity women, or if there is a single woman, youths and others will go and rescue her household materials.”
That sense of solidarity carried beyond the floods. During the latest eviction struggles, she said, “I strongly believe that the other communities were safe because of this community—because we had such strong unity. We were able to fight with hundreds of police for two hours! That is not a joke.”
A Brief History
By the time I met Januka Pokhrel that January day, I’d been traveling on assignment in Nepal for nearly a month, first in the western city of Pokhara and the climate-stressed Himalayan district of Lower Mustang, and I would spend three more weeks reporting in the Kathmandu Valley. It had been a little while since my last visit—thirty-three years. In November 1990, I arrived as a mostly clueless backpacker fresh out of college on a six-month spiritual quest across Asia.
On current emissions trajectories, the Himalayan glaciers may lose 80 percent of their volume by 2100.
Needless to say, a lot had changed. That year, 1990, happened to be a pivotal one in Nepal’s history, when the first People’s Movement threw off the monarchy’s authoritarian Panchayat system and instituted an initial attempt at parliamentary democracy. Six years later, it was followed by the decade-long Maoist insurgency and civil war, leading to a royal coup to restore autocracy in 2005. The coup in turn sparked the Second People’s Movement, resulting in another, more successful democratic revolution in 2006. This time, an alliance of the major political parties—foremost among them the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), or UML, alongside their erstwhile Maoist enemies—abolished the monarchy altogether. Eventually, haltingly, the parties gave Nepal its current constitutional system, with all its instability, rampant corruption, and constantly revolving coalition governments.
During all this, the Kathmandu Valley exploded in population, propelled at first by migration from the unsafe and untenable rural districts during the conflict years, and increasingly in more recent years by climate change—especially drought—as well as economic hopelessness in the countryside. The Valley’s iconic terraced fields and old Newari villages have long since been swallowed up by dense urbanization in all directions, extending into the surrounding hills. Vanishingly small patches of green space remain in what was once, even in 1990, a verdant agricultural landscape.
The Kathmandu Valley, with its 1,500-year-old Bagmati civilization and medieval royal cities of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, is considered among the cultural and architectural jewels of Asia, where an ancient form of Buddhism still thrives amid a majority Hindu society at the crossroads of India, Tibet, and China. In the 1960s, Kathmandu was famously embraced by the Western youth counterculture—the most prized and mythologized hangout on the Hippie Trail. By the 1970s and 1980s, Nepal had become the trekking capital of the world, home to Everest and the Annapurnas. Tourism of both the ecological and the spiritual kind eventually transformed the city, or at least its trendy Thamel section of backpacker hotels and cosmopolitan cafés, into a global holiday destination. These days, the tourists are as likely to be from the Subcontinent and East Asia as from Europe or North America.
As I prepared for my trip back to Nepal in December 2023, I spoke with the acclaimed Nepali Canadian novelist Manjushree Thapa, among the leading chroniclers and interpreters of modern Nepal, who divides her time between Toronto and Kathmandu. Having read her two essential nonfiction books on the Maoist conflict years and the democratic revolution, Forget Kathmandu (2005) and The Lives We Have Lost (2011), I asked her how Nepali society has changed since 1990 and how she would describe it today.
“My experience of Nepal,” Thapa told me on a video call from Toronto, “is that it’s changing so fast, it’s constantly rediscovering itself, constantly renarrativizing itself. After 1990, everything happened, the flood gates opened.” The Maoists, she noted, had their own reasons for launching their People’s War in 1996, but by 2006 and the peace accord, “the part that really took hold in the public imagination was the demand for equality—for women, for indigenous communities, for Dalits, for the Madhes community,” referring to an ethnic group in the Tarai, the southern plains bordering India. These were civil rights movements, she said, “which are all still going on, changing awareness and public discourse.” But with the long-delayed Constitution of 2015, pushed through after the devastating earthquakes in April of that year, the country’s high-caste governing elites “basically shut down the civil rights movements,” she explained. That year, Thapa said, marked “the end of an era of what the aid industry would call rights-based development.”
“The phase that Nepal is in now,” Thapa continued, “is a kind of neo-Panchayat [antidemocratic] phase of saying, ‘Let’s just get rich. Rights can be very disruptive, let’s not demand too much, we’ll get to that eventually. But right now, let’s just build roads, let’s make bridges, let’s do infrastructure development.’ So, there’s been this big boom in the contractor mafia. The contractors who are close to the political parties are basically running the country right now, making policy.”
Thapa noted that Nepal is on the verge of “graduating,” as they say, from the UN’s Least Developed Country (LDC) status to the middle-income rank, with major implications for its economy. “There’s a new ethos,” she said. “And Kathmandu, you’ll see—there is so much money in Kathmandu, and it is just being thrown around. The financial services have moved in, along with the contractors, this building boom. This is the new ethos. I’d say 1990 to 2006 was one era, and then from 2015 to now, we’re on this mad journey to enrich ourselves.”
Loss and Damage
Such is the city and the country that now faces an accelerating climate catastrophe. December 2023’s United Nations climate negotiations, COP28, held in Dubai, might best be remembered for two milestones: by all honest accounts, it represented the death knell of the Paris Agreement’s dream of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average, a threshold the Earth’s temperature has since touched in the past year. Second, it marked an acknowledgment that the era of what’s referred to as “loss and damage,” the inevitable results of global heating, is well underway—particularly for the most vulnerable countries of the Global South, among which Nepal ranks in the top ten. Without radical and coordinated global action to zero out greenhouse emissions by mid-century, the world is headed beyond an increase of not just 1.5 degrees but 2 degrees Celsius, the Paris Agreement’s “red line” (at which point all bets are off), on the way to perhaps 3 degrees Celsius or more within the lifetimes of today’s children. In a way, the achievement in Dubai of a UN-sponsored loss-and-damage fund to compensate developing countries for the climate catastrophes already upon them is an admission of failure by the Global North—those countries most responsible for the destruction—and the entire UN process.
During the intense rains, no one sleeps. They have to stay awake all night because the floods can come without warning.
Nepal presents a daunting case study. Manjeet Dhakal, director of Climate Analytics South Asia in Kathmandu and Advisor to the Chair of the UN’s LDC Group, explained to me that, in terms of climate impacts, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified South Asia as one of the most vulnerable regions on the planet. On current emissions trajectories, the Himalayan glaciers—what cryosphere experts call the planet’s “Third Pole ”—may lose 80 percent of their volume by 2100, with severe consequences for more than a billion people downstream. And that’s in addition to the effects of the changing South Asian monsoon, which has increased both severe drought and flooding, as well as a slew of other climate impacts, including lethal heat waves, wildfires, and the spread of disease.
I asked Dhakal if Nepal’s governing class has come to terms with what crossing the 1.5- and 2-degrees Celsius thresholds will mean for the country, including the destabilizing social impacts, or whether a national reckoning with climate reality is yet to come as it is in so many countries, including the United States.
“That is a very important question,” Dhakal said. “At the national level, we have not internalized the extent to which this will impact the economy, impact our well-being, how it will have a social impact.” He noted the four main pillars of Nepal’s economy, the first of which is remittances from oversees workers, accounting for nearly a third of Nepal’s GDP in recent years. “Eighteen percent of our workforce is based in the Middle East and Malaysia,” Dhakal said, “and temperature rise globally is highest in the Middle East.” The second pillar is agriculture, representing 28 percent of GDP, followed by tourism and hydropower. All four of these sectors, Dhakal noted, are directly vulnerable to climate change. He pointed out that one flood on the Kosi River in eastern Nepal reduced GDP by nearly 2 percent, and that after the earthquakes of 2015, economic growth fell from 6 or 7 percent to below 1 percent. “One event,” Dhakal said, “can collapse this fragile economy.” Now imagine the impact of multiple, cascading climate-driven disasters on Nepali society, not least in its densely populated and fast-growing cities.
The Kathmandu Valley’s urban climate crisis—or what Sonia Awale, the executive editor of the Nepali Times, has called “Kathmandu’s Polycrisis”—extends well beyond river flooding to include increasing rain-induced landslides on the Valley rim’s urbanizing slopes; worsening forest fires in western Nepal that add to the Valley’s deadly air pollution, already some of the worst in South Asia; and rapidly growing outbreaks of dengue fever, previously unknown in Kathmandu and the central hills of Nepal. Perhaps most ominous, though, is a looming water crisis—not too much water, but too little.
“We have a water problem, a serious water problem, in Kathmandu,” Bushan Tuladhar, head of the city’s Environment Department, told me. “The water demand is more than twice what we are able to supply. Much of what we use, more than half, is coming from groundwater, and the groundwater level is going down very quickly,” he said, largely because of unregulated urban growth and the drilling of wells, combined with a longer dry season and an erratic monsoon. “It’s like a ticking time bomb,” Tuladhar said. “When are we going to run out of water?”
The Kathmandu Valley’s rivers are rain-fed, not glacier-fed, Tuladhar explained, and one proposed solution to the area’s water scarcity has been a decades-long and much-troubled effort to bring in water from the Himalayas. The story of the resulting half-billion-dollar, ADB-funded Melamchi Water Supply Project might serve as a fable of what can go wrong when rapid urban growth meets climate extremes. Conceived of in a 1972 impact study and designed to carry a promised 170 million liters of water per day (the daily demand is now 480 million liters) to Kathmandu from the Melamchi River via tunnel and pipeline, the project’s construction was at last finished in March 2021. That June, a devastating flash flood carrying massive debris, brought on by extreme rainfall high in the mountains, severely damaged the tunnel’s intakes, which only narrowly escaped utter destruction. After more starts and stops, the Melamchi pipeline is finally back online—but at very little capacity, Tuladhar said, and not in the rainy season.
Now, there’s a new water project in the works, but it has nothing to do with bringing badly needed water to the Valley. Again financed by ADB as part of the Bagmati corridor “improvement” effort, the plan is to build a major (and dangerous) dam on the Nagmati River, a tributary of the Bagmati near its source in the hills north of Kathmandu, in order to “clean”—some say “flush”—the Bagmati by sending more water down its course in the long dry season. But as the Nepali Times editorialized in February, “Nagmati won’t clean Bagmati.” The only way to do that is to stop draining sewage into the river.
Prabin Man Singh is program director of the Prakrithi Resources Center (PRC), a development and environmental justice NGO with offices in the upscale Chandol neighborhood near the U.S. embassy. Singh has been working on climate adaptation in Nepal for the better part of two decades, first at Oxfam, where he started its Nepal climate program in 2009.
I told Singh that I had read the comprehensive National Adaptation Plan developed by Nepal’s government. The thing that struck me most, I said, is how the chapter on “implementation” begins by stating that the first priority must be to “build capacity,” as Nepal currently lacks the financial, technical, and administrative resources to implement the measures outlined in the plan. That was sobering, but it shouldn’t be surprising; most countries aren’t doing much better, as made clear by the UN Environment Program’s annual Adaptation Gap Report for 2023, aptly titled “Underfinanced. Underprepared.” Adaptation efforts have actually slowed globally.
So there appears to be a lot of brave talk and words on paper, I said, about adaptation and resilience—here in Nepal and everywhere—but is it just talk? Singh’s answer was refreshingly direct.
“If you look at the climate science,” Singh said, “it now clearly says that the era of climate extremes has begun. Loss and damage is inevitable. In Nepal, I think that there was an opportunity for adaptation maybe twenty years back, but for the last twenty years we’ve just put adaptation on paper, not on the ground. So it’s a missed opportunity. Now, the crises we are facing, like the Melamchi flood—to be very honest, I can’t think of any adaptation measures that could stop those sorts of catastrophes. So the whole era of adaptation, we have missed. We have a nice plan, as you say.”
I asked if it was an issue of capacity.
“There is no doubt that we need capacity building, of the government and other stakeholders,” Singh said. “But is there a sincere effort from the government to build the capacity? To be honest, I think the government has never prioritized the issue at all. We need a political consensus on the climate agenda.”
So far in Nepal, Singh explained, addressing climate change has been a “bureaucratic agenda” with no buy-in at a broader political level. To change that, he told me, PRC and other Nepali civil society groups have started to engage with elected politicians from districts hardest hit by climate extremes, in an effort to build a climate caucus within Parliament. “We’ve spent a decade trying to work with bureaucracy,” Singh told me. “Now we’re trying to work at the political level.”
A Revolution Betrayed
It makes no sense to talk about climate policy in isolation from the political and social realities in which it plays out. And if there’s anything I’ve come to understand about Nepal, it’s that this is a traumatized and precarious country. Setting aside the wealth that has been created for some in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal’s recent history has been one of conflict and revolution, natural disaster, pandemic, and of course, stark poverty and inequality in spite of economic growth. Although the poverty rate, by the government’s measure, is about half of what it was in 1990, it remains stubbornly persistent, with roughly one in five Nepalis living below the official poverty line of around $1.50 per day. And poverty in urban areas, including Kathmandu Valley, is rising. In just the past decade, Nepalis have suffered through earthquakes and Covid-19—which crippled tourism and overseas remittances—amid increasing climate-driven calamities. Looming in the background is the still recent memory of the civil war, with no accountability for war crimes committed by the Maoist forces and Nepal’s army and national police.
And yet nobody puts on a brave face like a Nepali. “I like to say that I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist about Nepal,” said Kunda Dixit, the eminent Nepali journalist who was the longtime editor-in-chief of the Nepali Times and is now its publisher. We were sitting in the offices of Himalmedia in Patan, south of the Bagmati River, an area popular with the Nepali professional class and the expat community.
“In the short term, we are headed down,” Dixit said. “Our economy is not doing well. Our politics is dysfunctional. The public is disillusioned with the existing system, with federalism, the political parties’ lack of delivery, the massive corruption scandals that have rocked Nepal in the last year—and the impunity, no one gets punished.”
But Dixit pointed out that there are bright spots as well. He cited the sharp decline in Nepal’s poverty rate and noted dramatic improvements in child and maternal mortality rates, along with other development and health indeces. “They’ve sort of plateaued off in the last five years, but still there is very dramatic improvement. So imagine if we’d had better governments, if we didn’t have ten years of ruinous conflict, if there wasn’t as much corruption and there was more accountability. We’d be much further ahead.”
I asked him how the poverty rate, while still high, has declined so much.
“The remittances,” Dixit said. “It’s our safety net—for families, as well as for the nation itself. The national economy rests on this.”
Think of the precarity of that, I said.
“I know, we’ve seen it,” Dixit said. “1.5 million Nepalis are in the Gulf region, and it’s very volatile, unstable.”
And it’s getting too hot to work there, I noted.
“Yes, and then what? What do we do?”
Given the political and social tensions within Nepal, I asked, does the labor migration serve as a kind of release valve?
“Imagine if we’d had better governments, if we didn’t have ten years of ruinous conflict, if there wasn’t as much corruption and there was more accountability. We’d be much further ahead.”
“Absolutely. It relieves the pressure. It lets the government off the hook, because they don’t have to do much to create jobs here. If you look at the twenty-to-forty age group, about half the men in that age group are not here.” That’s a large part of the voting population, he noted. “But the three main political parties are reluctant to allow absentee ballots at election time. They know it’s anti-incumbent.”
I remarked that there are now a couple generations of Nepalis who have personally witnessed, even taken part in, truly revolutionary political and social change. And yet, in my dozens of conversations with Nepalis, especially among the middle class, most have seemed fatalistic and disengaged when it comes to politics. It’s like they’ve given up on the possibility of once again changing the system.
“Yeah, there’s no stomach for it,” Dixit said. “Everyone is just trying to get on with their lives the best way they can.”
A few days after I met with Dixit, I sat down with Kishore Thapa, a former secretary in the Ministry of Urban Development and onetime candidate for mayor of Kathmandu, at the office of the Nepal Institute for Urban and Regional Studies in Patan.
The population of Nepal is nearly thirty million, Thapa noted. According to recently updated statistics, he told me, about a third of Nepal’s population is now urban. He estimates that the Kathmandu Valley has at least six million people (the official population is about three million, he explained, but most houses have one or two families as unregistered renters), which means, Thapa said, “60 percent of our urban population is living in the Kathmandu Valley.”
Echoing Dixit, Thapa observed that people are growing cynical about the political parties’ inability to implement effective policies to address the chaos of uncontrolled urbanization and the economic pressures now exacerbated by climate change. “Repeated, perpetual false promises, high expectations and low delivery, have generated this kind of frustration—and the frustration is deep-rooted now. The major obstacle is the political instability, frequent changes of government.”
“If business as usual continues,” Thapa said, “in my opinion this frustration will give way to urban rebellion. Nepal’s politics, previously, was rural-centric. Now it is urban-centric. And when people are jobless, don’t have good housing, don’t have health and education, they express their anger in terms of revolt.”
To this outside observer, however, the most striking feature of Nepal’s political landscape is the conspicuous absence of any genuine mass movement that might spur such a revolt—and this in a country that only nineteen years ago saw a democratic revolution in its streets. Nepal’s political left is weak (“intellectually bankrupt,” one erstwhile fellow traveler told me), perhaps because the still nominally Maoist and Marxist-Leninist communist parties have long since sold out to corruption and crony capitalism. Several people I spoke with, including Thapa and Dixit, pointed to the recent rise of the alternative, so-called independent Rastriya Swatantra Party, or RSP, as the biggest political development in years. But the upstart RSP, with its capable, more-or-less centrist technocrats sporting Ivy and Oxbridge degrees, is not a transformative movement so much as another liberal elite-led exercise in rearranging deck chairs as catastrophe looms dead ahead.
Life or Debt
In the latest round of UN climate negotiations, held this past November in Baku, Azerbaijan, the biggest issue on the table was who will pay, and how much, for adaptation, loss and damage, and the crucial phaseout of fossil fuels in the developing world, those countries where emissions are growing and economies, including Nepal’s, are already burdened under crisis-level proportions of foreign debt. Indeed, debt relief or outright cancellation has been floated by many advocates as a fitting place to start. It’s a simple and brutal fact that there will be no energy transition at the speed and scale necessary or anything close to adequate funding for whatever adaptation is still possible without a massive transfer of wealth from the Global North and the richest petrostates of the South, plus China, to the tune of several trillion dollars per year (for comparison, global GDP is around $110 trillion). The outcome in Baku was, to say the least, unsatisfactory: developing countries were promised a token $300 billion annually by 2035.
The threat of displacement by violent floods only grows with each monsoon.
But for Nepal, whose contribution to global warming is negligible, even if there were suddenly plenty of money through the UN process, the political and social obstacles to implementing effective policies would remain, at least until there is some kind of transformative shift in the country’s domestic politics. As Kunda Dixit told me, “With the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability, the lack of responsive governance, just pouring money into a country like Nepal will not really solve the problem. We really have to improve our own governance first.”
As a Global Northerner—and an American, no less—I’m not here to offer political advice to Nepalis. The United States, like most other countries, is far from prepared for what’s coming and has its own deep social inequities and divides, its own human rights failures, its own unacknowledged history of war crimes, its own intractable political dysfunction (to put it mildly), and now, with Trump’s return to power, its own plunge into corruption and a full-blown crisis of democracy.
But the fact is that we in the United States, and the Global North broadly, have economic, technological, institutional resources that countries like Nepal simply do not. And after all the carbon we’ve burned and all the wealth amassed doing so, we owe them. We owe them not only the rapid decarbonization of our economies, which will take a revolutionary political shift of our own, and not only our money and technology. Just as much, our governments and those of us in civil society—people working in NGOs and philanthropies, activists, and, yes, journalists—owe our tangible support to all those who are struggling for genuine democracy and human rights in their own countries, without which they haven’t a fighting chance.
Postscript, January 2025
In July 2024, more than a year and a half since that last attempt to evict Januka Pokhrel’s Thapathali community by force, Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled that the city government of Kathmandu could proceed with clearing the informal settlements along the Bagmati corridor—but only after providing proper housing for the genuinely landless squatters, with direct cash relief where necessary. Whether the mayor follows through remains to be seen, but the ruling was at least a moral victory, as the Court upheld the Nepali people’s constitutional right to adequate housing.
Even so, while the threat of violent eviction may have receded, the threat of displacement by violent floods only grows with each monsoon. On September 27 and 28 of last year, well after the monsoon should have ended, rain fell on the Kathmandu Valley at a rate unlike anything in living memory. Parts of the Valley, particularly to the south, received half their average annual rainfall in forty-eight hours, wreaking massive destruction in neighborhoods near the rivers. At least 250 people died in the Valley and the surrounding hills of central Nepal. Despite meteorological warnings, the national and local governments were caught flat-footed, and the emergency response and disaster relief were slow or lacking altogether.
I caught up with Bhagavati Adhikari on a video call in December. Pokhrel was safe, Adhikari told me, but her entire community had been inundated—the flood waters reached almost two stories high—and it took weeks to clean out her house.
I asked if there had been any progress with the government’s relocation process since the court ruling in July.
“No,” she said, “nothing is happening. Kathmandu city isn’t planning any resettlement alternatives. They don’t care about constitutional rights.”
“We need to believe in this Constitution,” Adhikari said. “The Constitution is the voice of the marginalized. That is the people’s hope.”