Present paper aims to discuss the Issues of Social Security and Citizenship pertaining to an elderly in Nepal. People of Nepal are deprived of social security benefit being devoid of the citizenship certificate. However, genuine and traditional and social and religious Janma Kundali, Chaurashi and Janko System are in existence in Nepal to verify the actual age of the elderly. Under the broad framework of the theory of Welfare state, the paper focused on issues of social security. Paper analyzes whether or not social security scheme in Nepal reflect the norms and values of the welfare state. Furthermore, paper analyze the aspect of micro level pros and cons of social security scheme and trace out systematic way to manage social security and citizenship program. Similarly, paper aims to analyze the…

To what extent does third-party coordination contribute substantially to conflict resolution? While the strategies mentioned in the existing conflict management literature focus on the fact that third parties should be coordinated to make them effective in intervention processes, they do not address how such coordination strategies have contributed to conflict resolution in actual practice. In the light of this research gap, and drawing upon the case of the Maoist armed conflict and peace process of Nepal, the focus of this paper is to provide empirical justifications of coordination strategies from two perspectives: coordination success and coordination effectiveness. The coordination success component evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of certain third-party coordination processes in conflict resolution efforts. The coordination effectiveness component assesses the actual contribution to conflict resolution of different coordinated actions…

Nepal is one of the world’s poorest countries with a per capita GDP of $427, ranking 163 out of the world’s 179 countries. Most of Nepal’s population, over 80%, is rural and involved in agriculture, mostly subsistence, with limited educational and economic opportunities. In the national level, over 60% of men and 45% of the women are literate. Among farming households, over 60% of the poor smallholding women and men are illiterate and are struggling for enough food to eat. Save the Children acknowledge and supports that all the people, especially children, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. Realizing the food insecurity situation and vulnerability in the Mid-Western…

40 minutes long documentary is a first time portrait of architectural heritage, Buddhist sites and monuments in remote valleys of central Himalaya of Nepal, known as Tsum sbas-yul skid-mo-lung, sacred and hidden lands of happiness. The documentary follows a sudden arrival of bulldozer (a heavy construction equipment) in the valley in September 2013 and construction of one of the eight North South Transit Route Developments (NSTRDs) aiming to connect Tibet Autonomous Region of China and India however, without any consideration of imminent threats on cultural fabric of the region. Based on the documentary, I argue that Tsum communities hold rich oral histories to explain the local significance on spiritual underpinnings of cultural heritage and their opinions on impacts of bringing a motor road goes much deeper than whether or not…

This paper investigates what happens when an indigenous language is allowed into school for the first time. While Nepal’s constitution has guaranteed all communities the right to basic education in their mother tongues since 1990, implementation of this promise has been slow. I argue that language-in-education policies, rather than being technical solutions to solvable problems as policies and international development agencies represent the issue, are sites of political struggle, shaped by relations of power and inequality between languages, and more especially their speakers. One result of these relations is that speakers of minoritized languages increasingly demand schooling in English for their children, and have in many cases shifted to using Nepali in their daily lives. Language policies designed for idealized homogeneous villages, moreover, are poorly equipped to confront realities of…

  Suicide is one of the fastest-growing and least-understood causes of death, particularly in low and middle-income countries (WHO 2011). The institutions involved in the derivation of taxonomic categories used to define and report suicide deaths, importantly shape how the burden is understood, (un)validated, and responded to at varying levels of social authority (familial, community, national). Despite growing recognition of the high burden of suicide deaths in low and middle income countries (WHO 2008) and an alarming level of suicide among Nepali women specifically (Suvedi et al, 2009), Nepal’s Ministry of Health does not systematically collect or report on suicides (Khan, 2002; Pradhan et al, 2011). Suicide data are filtered through reporting systems shaped by social, cultural, legal, and medical institutions. This study seeks to analyze networks drawn by police,…

As part of a larger comparative project on middlemen in South Asia and Latin America, this paper addresses the social category of dalāl in Nepali society with a particular focus on manpower agents. Borrowed from Arabic and Farsi, the term, dalāl, stems from the Semitic root  "dal-lam-lam" which carries the meaning of guiding, or pointing something out, or evening directing someone towards something. In South Asian Sanskrit-based languages, it has come to signify brokers, or middlemen traders, of goods and people. In Nepali language and society, dalāl refers to a range of occupations as varied as prostitution pimps and real estate agents. In these various roles, the dalāl serves an in-between role as, for instance, a negotiator between two parties, or a translator of legal and illegal codes and practices, or…

New conservation territories, including buffer zones, migration corridors, and community wildlife management areas, have proliferated worldwide since the 1980s. Many of these conservation territories are critical components of community-based conservation (CBC) strategies meant to reduce the social and political conflicts historically associated with traditional protected areas such as national parks. There is a growing body of evidence, however, suggesting that CBCs and associated conservation territories often not only fail to defuse conflicts but also may even create new ones. Using the case of Nepal, the proposed paper seeks to understand how and why social and political conflict around ethnic identity and property rights is either reduced or exacerbated within new conservation territories. In particular, my paper examines whether and how the conservation interventions around the buffer zones of Chitwan National Park are shaping new conflicts around property rights…

Modernization and development are the two logical and practical instruments of the State or the state-makers. Through these two instruments, the state-makers not only promote their own culture, language, religion and economic mode of production but also expand their politico-economic and cultural hegemony simultaneously colonizing over other cultures and economic systems. On one hand the State implements all these in the name of state-making and development of nation, the same process imposes colonial impacts upon other cultures and societies on the other. On the whole such a process unsuccessfully tries to create a homogenous  'nation-state' by incorporating and assimilating 'other'  cultures and societies into the state-makers'  'own'  culture, religion, language and economic mode of production. In this regards, the state making process, if it is controlled by a certain hegemonic…

Nepal and the East India Company expanded into the Himalayan foothills and adjoining tarai in the late eighteenth century by employing a number of similar strategies but quite divergent understandings of state formation and power. Nepal dismantled a number of hill polities consisting of self-proclaimed Rajput lineages that controlled trans-Himalayan trade routes along with some area of agricultural land in the tarai; disputes between the Company and Nepal formed around these tarai holdings of the former principalities. The former hill polities had gained authority over largely indigenous groups of subjects, as well as an increasing monopoly on local property regimes, from the sixteenth century. In order to gain political traction in the northern tarai and southern Himalayan foothills, both Nepal and the East India Company had to negotiate with former…