The major components of an ICT infrastructure is hidden to the general public which creates a false perception that the ICT sector is energy efficient and a significant underestimate in its total energy consumption. This work is a preliminary investigation into the energy demand of the Nepali ICT sector. We present a statistical model to analyse the contribution of the ICT sector in the national energy consumption scenario with a specific focus on the telecommunication sector. Although the model leaves out some important dimensions due to lack of publicly available data, the stable regression model can easily be expanded to accommodate new dimensions (indicators). The results show that even with the most lenient assumptions regarding the behaviour of the ICT sector, it is a (statistically) significant consumer of energy. The…

There are over 3000 MHPs of different size and capacity contributing approximately generating 32 MW of electricity in Nepal. Over the next 20 years, the government wants to expand the share of electricity generated from micro and mini-hydro plants to 15 percent of total electricity demand. The apex government body for promoting the renewable energy technologies in Nepal, the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre (AEPC) wants one MHP every village [1]. In the absence of a national census, both the number and significance of MHPs becomes little unreliable. There are, however, good indicators which suggest that MHPs have brought substantial changes in the quality of life and in the social capital formation in the project sites. Besides, the MHPs have created a whole array of forward and backward linkages in the…

The proposed panel will investigate technology-society linkages in Nepal. It aims to be a blueprint for similar productive enquiries into the changes in material and natural endowment of poor societies all over the world. Standard accounts frame the relationship within tools-and-transfer approach, which assumes that technologies (not all, but ‘sexy’ ones thought as typically linked to modernity) were instrumental in bringing revolutionary changes in these societies and that the most fruitful research is the question about dynamics of their introduction and diffusion in the host landscape. The approach suits those modernising elite, which wish to understand the ‘barriers’ and ‘constraints’ in order to remove them and usher their poor fellow countrymen into (post)modern world. The papers in the panel contrastingly, focus on existing use and not merely on innovation or…

The idea of creating new universities out of the constituting colleges of Tribhuvan University (TU) has a long history. When the then Mahendra Sanskrit University (MSU) was started as Nepal’s second university in 1986, this idea was first put into practice by transferring some of TU’s colleges to MSU. However it was only after the end of the Panchayat System in 1990 that discussions around this idea became thick as a way to reduce the size and management challenges of TU. After many false starts, it was only in 2010 that three new universities – Agriculture and Forestry University, Far-Western University and Mid-Western University – were established by separate Acts passed by Nepal’s parliament with the proposed transfer of specific constituting and affiliated campuses of TU to the new universities.…

Nepal’s oldest university, Tribhuvan University (TU), was established in 1959 as a state-supported public university. In keeping with the centralized king-controlled nature of the polity under the ‘Partyless Panchayat System’ (1960-1990), TU was allowed to be the only university in Nepal until 1986. When Panchayat folded in 1990, the size of the student body at TU, the number of its constituent colleges and those to which it had provided affiliations had grown by many folds. After describing the manifold problems in Nepal’s higher education sector, the 1992 Report of the National Education Commission (NEC) identified the centralization of authority whereby all of TU’s colleges had to rely on its Kathmandu officers for academic direction and financial assistance as a main reason for that institution’s ill-management. Several projects funded by donors…

In this paper, I look at the trajectories of higher education expansion in Nepal through “affiliation” mode, which in essence allows a university to award degrees to students from campuses in return for the payment of affiliation fees. Nepal has a relatively short history of higher education. Discussions for the establishment of a Nepali university were first initiated in 1948, which focused, inter alia, on the nature of the university to be established—teaching or affiliating, or both. In the mid-1950s, when Nepal embarked on a systematic development of a national education system following the political change of 1951, the option laid out for the establishment of a university was a combination of “teaching” and “affiliation” functions. According to the report of the Nepal National Education Planning Commission (1955: 129), this…

Various high level commissions set up by the Government of Nepal and several projects funded by donors such as the World Bank have attempted to address the problems in the higher education sector in Nepal. Some of the major reform initiatives that were started in the early 1990s include the concepts of multi-universities and the decentralization of Tribhuvan University. However, macro-level evidence thus far suggests that these efforts have not been all that successful. Furthermore, there is relatively little research-based academic or media engagement with the various reforms initiated in the higher education sector in the past 25 years. The three papers in this panel try to redress this gap by providing analyses based on detailed historical and contemporary data collected through a mix of research methods. The first paper…

Nepal's Lok Dohori industry is based on migration. The majority of performers, arrangers, producers, investors, and even most of its audience are rural-urban migrants within Nepal, and many have spent time working abroad. Song production is a collaborative process involving many different individuals, most of whom will have personal experience engaging with popular songs as migrants themselves. Based on ethnographic research in Nepal's music industry and among migrant performers and fans in the UK, US, and Bahrain, this paper examines how artists in the music industry contribute to shaping the experience of migrant life by highlighting particular emotional states, particularly those of suffering, longing, and nostalgia, in the songs and music videos they produce. I suggest that modern Nepali popular songs about migration draw on poetic tropes of dukha (suffering)…

Despite recurrent stories of exploitation, ill-health, suffering and death amongst Nepali labour migrants, widely circulated in literatures, media and NGO discourses, young men’s aspiration to out-migrate from rural Nepal has never been higher. In their attempt to escape the regimented and constrained life in rural Nepal, most migrants go through a considerable debt and hardship to organize their mobility only to find themselves in the midst of difficult and exploitative working and living conditions in their destination. Migrants’ lives are also characterized by fun, excitement, adventure in the form of drinking, cinemas, use of gadgets such as mobile phones, images of high rise buildings and wide roads amongst others that offer powerful avenues through which these migrants maintain sense of purpose despite the difficulties they face. Reflecting on my own…

Why are stories worth telling about Nepali experiences of labor migration necessarily focus on suffering (dukha)? Studying the XXth century Nepalese diasporic literature, Michael Hutt (1998) has demonstrated the pervasiveness of dukha in many novels or short stories about the flight and settlement of poor Nepalese in India. Recent research, documenting diverse experiences of Nepalese migration to India, the Persian region, and the West, increasingly centers on discourses about pain, dilemma, and hardship abroad. These migration narratives of dukha are widely spread in the form of poems, popular songs, amateur films by Nepali migrants and their families at home and abroad. The cultural production and circulation of these migration narratives in the Nepalese society and in popular media, however, has not been fully understood. Migrants themselves, on Youtube for example,…