What makes a sukumbasi?
On the Balen Shah government's eviction of squatters in Kathmandu
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from Kathmandu. This is Issue 236 of Kalam Weekly, the only newsletter you need to keep updated with everything happening in Nepal.
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Movie night with Kalam
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And now, on to more important matters.
In this newsletter:
A government with a near two-thirds majority chooses to rule by ordinance
Heidelberg University returns over 800 rare manuscripts to Nepal
Foreign Ministry mulls open call for ambassadors
Recommendations
The deep dive: What makes a sukumbasi?
A government with a near two-thirds majority chooses to rule by ordinance
Last Thursday, April 22, President Ram Chandra Poudel, acting on the government’s recommendation, called a parliamentary session for April 30. However, the very next day, he adjourned both Houses of Parliament, again on the government’s recommendation. Then, on Monday, April 27, the Balen Shah government sent ordinances to President Poudel for endorsement that aim to amend nearly 20 different acts, including those on the Constitutional Council, cooperatives, universities, land, and public procurement. Despite having a near two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives, the Shah government has decided to rule by ordinance.
Ordinances are executive orders that do not require parliamentary approval. The Council of Ministers can issue them on its own, provided they are approved by the President. However, the Constitution dictates that ordinances be used only when Parliament is not in session, and there is an urgent need to pass legislation. Ordinances carry the same power as Acts passed by Parliament, but they must be tabled before Parliament when it reconvenes and passed by a majority within 60 days. If not passed, the ordinances cease to be effective. In this particular instance, it is not really clear why the government has decided to pursue ordinances when it could easily get its bills passed through the House of Representatives.
Perhaps the government is not too confident about the National Assembly. For a bill to become law, it must be passed by both Houses of Parliament. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), which runs the government, currently holds 183 seats in the 275-member Lower House, or House of Representatives. The party has no representation in the 59-member Upper House, or the National Assembly. The Nepali Congress has the most seats at 24 with the Nepali Communist Party (formerly the Maoists) in second place with 18 seats. There is no guarantee that the Congress and the communists will allow any of the RSP’s bills to clear the National Assembly, especially not a bill as controversial as the Constitutional Council bill.
Numerous governments have attempted to pass a bill to amend the Constitutional Council’s functioning, the body that nominates the chief justice, ambassadors, and chiefs of constitutional commissions. The Council is made up of six members — the Prime Minister, the House Speaker, Deputy Speaker, chair of the National Assembly, leader of the opposition, and the chief justice; the latter is replaced by the Law Minister when appointing a new chief justice. Existing law mandates that all members be present to achieve a quorum and hold a meeting. In the past, Council members from the opposition have refused to attend meetings, delaying vital constitutional appointments. The UML under KP Sharma Oli attempted to pass an ordinance twice to amend the existing law so that a simple majority with the mandatory presence of the prime minister could hold meetings and nominate names. He was rebuffed each time as his government fell before the ordinance could be tabled in Parliament within the requisite 60 days.
The Shah government appears to believe that the same thing could happen to it. The RSP only has Prime Minister Balen Shah and House Speaker Dol Prasad Aryal while Deputy Speaker Ruby Kumari Thakur is from the Shram Sanskriti Party, and National Assembly chair Narayan Prasad Dhakal is from the Nepali Communist Party. The primary opposition, the Nepali Congress, only elected a parliamentary party leader on Monday, meaning no meetings of the Constitutional Council could have been held so far. And a meeting is urgently needed to nominate the new chief justice. Prakash Man Singh Raut retired as chief justice on March 31 with Sapana Pradhan Malla taking over as acting chief justice. The constitution mandates that the new chief justice be nominated a month before the office is vacated due to retirement. This never happened, as an interim electoral government was in place a month before Raut’s retirement. The constitution also states that, in special cases such as death or resignation, the new chief justice must be appointed no later than a month, and that deadline is now here.
The Shah government likely hopes to push through the amendment via ordinance, hold a Constitutional Council meeting, and nominate the next chief justice, likely to be Sapana Pradhan Malla. Once the Chief Justice is in place, the RSP and the Shah government can work together to present the ordinance before both Houses of Parliament and convince the Upper House to vote in favor. This is a version of events very charitable to Shah and his government. Hopefully, this is what he is going to do. Otherwise, resorting to rule by ordinance so early in his tenure, especially when he has the whole Lower House on his side, does not say good things about Shah. Just over a month as prime minister, and there is already concern about Shah’s authoritarian tendencies. His resorting to ordinances is just adding fuel to that fire.
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Heidelberg University returns over 800 rare manuscripts to Nepal
Last Friday, April 24, Heidelberg University in Germany handed over 800 precious manuscripts dating from the 13th to the 20th century to the Embassy of Nepal in Berlin. These manuscripts include official documents and personal notes, 460 of which are on palm-leaf scrolls, possibly the largest collection of such scrolls outside Nepal.
These documents were left to Indologist Dr. Axel Michaels, a senior professor at Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute, by a private collector. The collector expressly wished that the documents be returned to Nepal, according to Dr. Michaels. However, before returning these fragile documents, Dr. Michaels carefully cleaned, preserved, and digitized them. This is the ideal case for manuscripts and documents — physical and digital preservation abroad in countries that have the technology, skills, and finances, followed by a return of the originals to the country where they belong.
The return of these documents comes on the heels of a broader movement to bring back Nepal’s lost and looted cultural heritage from across the world. Organizations like the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign and anonymous social media groups like Lost Arts of Nepal are identifying Nepali works of art in foreign museums and collections, and then lobbying to bring them back home. Most recently, in December 2025, 198 looted artifacts were returned to Nepal from private collections and museums in the United States and Europe.
Foreign Ministry mulls open call for ambassadors
Media reports emerged this week saying that the Foreign Ministry is planning to open up ambassadorships to the general public through an open call. Although the ministry has yet to confirm this, sources close to Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal say that this open call is definitely under consideration. If this comes to pass, it would be the first time that ambassadors will be selected through open competition.
Nepal has 44 diplomatic missions abroad — 34 embassies and 10 consulates. According to the Guidelines on the Appointment of Ambassadors, 50 percent of these positions should be filled through the foreign service, while the other 50 percent can be political appointments. Many other countries, including the US and India, have similar provisions. Sergio Gor, the US Ambassador to India who is currently in Nepal, is a businessman who was politically appointed by US President Donald Trump. Political appointments are not necessarily bad, as ambassadors are the foreign arm of the domestic government and can work to advance the government’s plans and policies.
However, political appointments have long been abused by the mainstream political parties to reward party loyalists, who sometimes end up controversial. For instance, in 2018, Nepali Ambassador to Australia Lucky Sherpa was recalled after she was accused of human trafficking. She was alleged to have facilitated the entry of unrelated persons to Australia as part of her diplomatic retinue in exchange for cash. Though the accusation was never substantiated, Sherpa was recalled and ultimately resigned. In 2013, Ambassador to Qatar, Maya Kumari Sharma, was recalled after she publicly called the Gulf state an “open jail” when speaking about the conditions of Nepali migrant workers. She may have been right, but it was not a very diplomatic comment.
On April 6, the Shah government recalled six politically appointed ambassadors — Shankar Sharma (India), Chitralekha Yadav (Australia), Purna Bahadur Nepali (Sri Lanka), Shiva Maya Tumbahangphe (South Korea), Sumnima Tuladhar (Denmark), and Kapil Shrestha (South Africa). They were given a month to wrap up their diplomatic engagements and return to Nepal. With that deadline expiring next week, the government now has an opportunity to appoint 17 ambassadors, including those who resigned voluntarily after the March election and those whose terms expired. If the media reports are true, the government will call for applications for at least some of these open positions. It should be interesting to see what criteria the Foreign Ministry will set and what the application and selection process will be like.
Who knows, I might just put in an application.
Recommendations
Essay: Blood, guts, gore by Xifali, The Shy Girl’s Guide to Freedom
Interview: सुकुमवासीको व्यवस्थापन मानवताका आधारमा हुनुपर्छ, सबिन निङ्लेखु, कान्तिपुर
Book: Land ownership in Nepal by Mahesh Chandra Regmi, University of California Press
The deep dive: What makes a sukumbasi?
An image from 2012’s eviction of squatters from Thapathali. (Image: Narendra Shrestha/EPA)
On Saturday, April 25, the Balen Shah government, in coordination with local authorities and the state security forces, began the demolition of squatter settlements in Thapathali, Gairigaun, and Manohara. By Sunday, the settlements had been razed to the ground, and all squatters were asked to relocate elsewhere or move to temporary shelters at the Dashrath Stadium and elsewhere in the Valley. Hundreds of homes have now been destroyed and thousands of people displaced.
While there is a triumphalist narrative from the Shah government and its supporters, demolishing buildings and removing squatters will not resolve urban landlessness. The government has emphasized rule of law — that such squatter settlements are illegal. This might technically be true, but poverty and landlessness are not just legal issues; they are socio-political problems that need socio-political solutions. Squatters, or sukumbasi, are the consequence of broader nationwide pressures that require long-term policy instruments, not short-term actions that treat deep structural issues as if they were solely about aesthetics.
In this deep dive, we’ll trace the long and complicated history of squatter settlements in the Kathmandu Valley — what drove people to come here, the urban pressures that led them to adopt the riverbanks as their home, and the many governmental attempts to resolve this thorny issue, primarily through force.
People arrive, squatters and slums grow
The first squatter settlements in Kathmandu emerged in the 1970s after modernization and urbanization began in the Kathmandu Valley, once the Rana rule ended. Then, too, squatters settled along the riverbanks in Thapathali, Shankhamul, and Teku due to their proximity to water and employment centers. Despite the Panchayat era’s focus on rural development and the redistribution of population across the country, the push factors in the villages — a lack of jobs and proper education — were too strong. By the end of the 1990s, Kathmandu already had 17 squatter settlements. The early evolution of squatter settlements in the Kathmandu Valley is documented in ‘Urban Growth and Informal Settlements: Understanding the Evolution of Squatter Communities in Kathmandu Valley,’ a paper by Nava Raj Pyakurel and Diwat Kumar Shrestha, published in 2025 in the NPRC Journal of Multidisciplinary Research.
The squatter population really exploded in the 1990s after the Panchayat ended and Nepal embarked on a new program of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation. The benefits that the opening of markets was supposed to deliver were not equally distributed, with much wealth concentrated in the Kathmandu Valley. Agricultural land was rapidly converted to residential and commercial uses, often without formal zoning or infrastructure planning. With the state unable or unwilling to implement proper urban planning measures, the private sector dominated land subdivision, resulting in fragmented, unregulated urban sprawl occupied primarily by low-income migrants.
But it was in the late 1990s that the squatter population exploded. In 1996, the Maoists launched their ‘People’s War’, turning rural settlements into battlegrounds. As the conflict escalated, Nepalis began to desert their homes in the hinterlands for the safety of urban centers. According to UN-Habitat’s 2010 urban housing sector profile, up until the mid-1990s, the major reasons for rural-urban migration were primarily “soil erosion from natural disasters or deforestation, a shortage of inherited land and lack of alternative income sources in the villages, and the health care, schooling and employment opportunities in the cities.” But after the mid-90s, the primary cause was conflict. An estimated 1 million people fled their homes. By the end of the civil war in 2006, the squatter population in the Kathmandu Valley had tripled, mushrooming to 64 settlements with an estimated 14,500 people, according to a 2013 Urban Forum paper by Bijaya K. Shrestha.
The next major shock came in 2015, when the Gorkha earthquake hit. Thousands of homes were destroyed across the country, and many more rendered unlivable. In the Kathmandu Valley alone, over 115,000 homes were damaged beyond repair. Many of these homes belonged to low-income households, and with reconstruction funds locked behind a wall of bureaucracy, these families were forced to relocate to temporary settlements on public land. Over time, these temporary accommodations turned permanent. According to estimates from the Nepal Landless Democratic Union Party, by 2019, there were 29,000 squatters living in 73 locations in the Kathmandu Valley.
(Image: Typology of squatter settlements from Pyakurel, N. R., & Shrestha, D. K. (2025). Urban Growth and Informal Settlements: Understanding the Evolution of Squatter Communities in Kathmandu Valley. NPRC Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 2(11), 103–122.)
The state acts, but not very well
National and local governments were well aware of the rising number of slums and squatter settlements. But targeted measures and policy instruments were always inadequate, primarily due to a failure of implementation, but also a failure to acknowledge the root causes of migration and the ensuing homelessness and poverty when in the big city.
During the early phase of urbanization in the Kathmandu Valley in the 70s and 80s, authorities paid little attention to squatter settlements. The Valley was still largely agrarian, and land was plentiful. But with the 90s and the capture of much of Kathmandu’s land by private interests, land prices began to skyrocket, and every little parcel of land was plotted and sold to the highest bidder. In the absence of zoning regulations and rent control, land and housing became increasingly unaffordable to the poor, many of whom resorted to squatting on public land. Dalits, often refused housing by other castes, had no option but to find public spaces on which to build homes.
While squatting and slums were most visible in the Kathmandu Valley, landlessness was not an urban problem alone. There are an estimated 1.3-1.5 million landless people in Nepal, among whom Dalits and freed bonded laborers make up a significant proportion. Long marginalized by the caste system, Dalits, despite constituting 13 percent of the country’s population, hold just 1 percent of land. Traditional bonded labor systems — Kamaiya, Haliya, Haruwa, Charuwa — were abolished and ‘freed’ laborers promised land of their own. This promise never materialized for the vast majority, forcing them to settle on riverbanks and barren land.
(For a more comprehensive account of all the issues pertaining to land and landlessness in Nepal, consider reading Land Reform in Nepal: Problems and Prospects by Jagannath Adhikari.)
Over the decades, nearly two dozen commissions have been formed to look into the issue of landlessness. Most were dissolved, some completed their terms, but their recommendations did not lead to any action. The primary focus of most of these commissions was to differentiate between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ landless people, with the former eligible for small land grants in urban areas or larger rural plots. Other recommendations included relocation to low-income housing and, more rarely, the regularization of existing settlements, if possible, but never on riverbanks or other hazard-prone areas. On the recommendations of these commissions, some 46,000 bighas or 30,820 hectares of land were distributed to around 150,000 families in the last three decades, or about 10 percent of the estimated landless population. Other recommendations, however, were never implemented due to quick political turnover, a lack of political will, poor cadastral records, and the lack of distributable land.
Landlessness was also a central pillar of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the Maoist conflict. Point 3.10 of the agreement pledges: “To adopt policy of providing land and other economic protection to socially and economically backward classes including land less squatters, bonded laborers and pastoral farmers [sic].” Although this was an acknowledgment of the large number of landless people who supported the Maoist movement, the Maoists themselves did little to address this particular issue once they joined mainstream politics.
However, over the years, Nepal did adopt numerous progressive pieces of legislation. The Constitution of Nepal 2015, through Article 40.5 and 40.6 mandate that landless Dalits be given plots of land and housing. Similarly, Article 51.J.6 compels the state to enact policies “to identify the freed bonded labours, Kamlari, Harawa, Charawa, tillers, landless, squatters and rehabilitate them by providing housing, housing plot for residence and cultivable land or employment for their livelihoods [sic].” The National Land Policy, adopted in 2019, also pledges, in Section 2.3, to provide land and housing to landless families. Similarly, Section 52 of the Eighth Amendment to the Lands Act, enacted in 2020, compels the state to form a committee and provide land to landless squatters and Dalits within three years. The Right to Housing Act, adopted in 2018, also pledges to provide affordable housing to the homeless and landless. Despite this spate of legislation that pledges to provide land to the landless and resolve their issues once and for all, little has been done to implement these measures beyond forming commissions.
Kicking out squatters in Kathmandu
Landlessness is a pervasive problem throughout Nepal, but getting into the details of this issue would require a book-length work, so let’s get back to Kathmandu for now.
The plethora of progressive federal-level legislation that has promised land to the landless does not seem to have been applied in the three cities of the Kathmandu Valley. Instead, authorities have taken the approach of evicting first and compensating later.
During the second half of the war years, 1996-2006, the police would sporadically clear squatter settlements under the guise of security. During the national emergency years, from 2001 to 2004, the government cleared numerous settlements in Tinkune, Shankhamul, and Thapathali as a security measure. These settlements always came back days or weeks after.
Once the war ended, the urban logic in the Kathmandu Valley shifted towards aesthetics. The Bagmati River, which had become a major eyesore in the heart of the Valley, was deemed a primary site for clean-up and beautification. Thus was born the High-Powered Committee for Integrated Development of the Bagmati Civilization (HPCIDBC, even the acronym is a chore to get through). Since its formation in 2008, the Committee’s work has largely focused on cleaning up the Bagmati and beautifying its banks by clearing slums and squatter settlements and converting them into parks. Despite nearly two decades of action, the Bagmati remains a sewer, but the committee has had more success along the riverbanks. The UN Park, which lies along the southern banks of the Bagmati in Thapathali, has been renovated and is functioning well. But the northern edge of the river, with its dense squatter settlements, has remained a ‘problem’ for the committee and the city of Kathmandu.
One of the most prominent attempts to evict squatters from the Bagmati riverbanks came in 2012, under the government led by Baburam Bhattarai, the former second-in-command of the Maoists. In May 2012, Kathmandu municipality officials and the Armed Police Force bulldozed dozens of homes to make way for a planned ‘urban development project.’ According to Human Rights Watch, 257 homes were destroyed and 844 people left homeless. Even a primary school with 200 students was destroyed. Amidst the ensuing media coverage and outrage from advocacy groups, Bhattarai relented and pledged to provide alternative housing for squatters before initiating another eviction.
Bhattarai initiated the development of the Ichangu Narayan Housing Project for Squatters and the Urban Poor, a government-owned housing project that would provide homes to squatters at low-interest loans. Construction ended in 2014 with 227 units measuring 200 square feet each. Each home was priced at Rs 1.2 million (Rs 12 lakhs) and would be sold to squatters through loans. No one moved in. The sukumbasi said that the housing project was too expensive, too far from the city center where most of them worked, and that public transportation was not easily available. They resented the fact that the government had not consulted them in the construction of the housing project and never asked them what their needs were. Today, the housing project remains barren except for a few government offices and police posts that operate out of some of the units.
The Ichangu Narayan Housing Project is often contrasted with the Kirtipur Housing Project, a similar project developed in 2005 by Lumanti, a non-governmental organization. This project resettled families displaced by the Bishnumati Link Road Project, providing them with homes at low-interest loans. The difference is that his project was developed in close consultation with the displaced families, taking their needs and wishes into account. The project also provided a few housing units to locals from Kirtipur, providing an anchor to the community. Over 20 years later, the Kirtipur Housing Project continues to be occupied by the inhabitants for whom it was created, and is hailed as an example of how resettlement should be conducted.
After 2012, it took ten more years before authorities mounted another similar eviction effort. In 2022, Mayor Balen Shah once again attempted to evict squatters, just like Bhattarai had done in 2012. But Shah encountered much more resistance. City officials who had arrived with bulldozers were quickly beaten back by squatters hurling rocks. Residents banded together to prevent the wholesale destruction of their homes, while activists and rights groups decried the demolition of homes without plans for alternative housing. Shah, too, was forced to back off. The federal government intervened to ask Shah to halt the eviction effort, and legal challenges in the courts upheld squatters’ rights against being made homeless. The Kathmandu District Court and Patan High Court both ordered an immediate halt to demolitions until alternative housing arrangements could be made.
Shah might have backed off, but he did not forget. Last week, he followed up on his thwarted plans, finally doing what he set out to do in 2012. Dozens of homes bulldozed, hundreds of sukumbasi evicted.
So, what is to be done?
Rights groups have long called for the identification and enumeration process to be conducted before any evictions. There is a widespread belief that Kathmandu’s sukumbasi are not ‘genuine’ landless people but are ‘hukumbasi,’ politically connected people who simply choose to live alongside the rotting stench of the flood-prone Bagmati river, despite owning land and homes in Kathmandu or other parts of the country. There may well be unscrupulous actors who have encroached on public land and are using it for nefarious purposes. Some have even built concrete houses on the riverbanks that they lease out to others. But most sukumbasi are not frauds. Ask yourself, if you could live anywhere else, why would you live beside the Bagmati?
Shah might have evicted squatters for the time being, but he is treating a socio-political problem as if it were a law-and-order one. Yes, they were squatting on public land, which is illegal, but the question of why they chose to break the law is more pertinent. Shah’s most ardent defenders seem to believe that squatters squat out of choice, a perverse rationality born out of a belief that your actions alone, either in this life or the previous, are responsible for who you are today. But humans in contemporary society are at the confluence of a host of social, political, and economic factors often beyond their control. Dalits and bonded laborers like the kamaiya carry the weight of generations of discrimination and hostility that no amount of individual choices can lighten.
Yes, squatters living along the riverbanks needed to be relocated. Their living conditions were hazardous. Floodwaters invaded their homes every monsoon, and poor sanitation meant frequent outbreaks of disease. But, as rights groups and concerned members of the public have argued, the relocations could have been conducted in a much more humane manner. The identification of ‘real’ sukumbasi, a constant pet peeve of the state, could’ve been done before they were summarily removed from their homes. A more concerted effort could’ve been made in the weeks leading up to the eviction to relocate squatters, their belongings, and their pets and livestock. They didn’t have to be kicked out of their homes just before the monsoon.
Now that the Nepal Army is demanding all details of sukumbasi settlements across the country from local governments, we must ask: where is this all going? Two people have reportedly already died by suicide due to the precarity of their lives as sukumbasi with nowhere to go. Countless commissions and nearly half a dozen legal instruments, including the constitution, acknowledge that the landless deserve land, shelter, and compensation. Instead of empathizing with their plight and finding ways to help them, as the numerous commissions have suggested, the state is bulldozing their homes at the barrel of a gun. Where will they all be relocated? How long will it take? Does the government have a plan?
Governments often assume that they rule when they are really meant to serve. Squatters, even when they break the law, have inalienable rights to life and liberty. They too deserve a warm place to sleep without having to worry about where they will go tomorrow. As much as the law must be applied equally, it must be applied fairly. The law is justice only insofar as it serves and protects the most vulnerable. Therein lies the measure of this government.
That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your inbox, with the next edition of Kalam Weekly.
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