It’s April 12, 2024, and you’re reading Off the Record.
I’m Pranaya Rana and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive into one singular issue that defined the past week.
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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from apocalyptic Kathmandu. The Kathmandu Valley has been blanketed in a thick shroud of pollution for the past week. Any prolonged time spent outdoors leads to itchiness in the eyes, difficulty breathing, and a persistent cough. Visibility has greatly decreased and in the evenings, as the sun sets, Kathmandu looks like a still from the Dune movie, all covered in an angry red haze. More on that in the deep dive for today.
First, a word on the newsletter. A big thank you to my new paid subscribers — Manish Kayastha, a long-time supporter of The Record, and Prakriti Mishra, an old friend and classmate. I am closing out the Nepali year 2080 with a total of 3,011 subscribers and 68 paid subscribers. To me, those are great numbers but I would love to go higher and further. All of you, dear readers, have been very supportive and I couldn’t have done this without you. Help me reach new heights in the coming year!
Now, a quick recap of the week.
Congress demands probe, RSP plays reverse UNO card
The Nepali Congress party, which is now in opposition, has been demanding Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal lead a parliamentary probe into Home Minister and Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) chair Rabi Lamichhane over allegations of his involvement in defrauding members of banking cooperatives. On Tuesday, the party even obstructed House proceedings saying that its demands were being ignored. Lamichhane, for his part, has denied all allegations and said that he is ready to face a parliamentary inquiry. However, his party is insisting that if Lamichhane is to face a probe then so should all other parties who have corruption allegations against them. Swarnim Wagle, the party vice-chair, proposed a ‘grand public inquiry’ into all corruption scandals since 1990.
I understand the RSP’s frustration. So far, Lamichhane has not been named in any fraud case filed by the Nepal Police. All allegations against Lamichhane have been leveled in the press by Kantipur Daily. Similar allegations have been made against politicians from all of the major parties, including the Congress’ Mohan Bahadur Basnet when he was Health Minister and Gyanendra Bahadur Karki when he was Communications Minister; and the UML’s Gokul Baskota when he was Communications Minister. So no party is clean here and as the saying goes, don’t toss rocks at others if you live in glass houses.
However, the RSP and Lamichhane would set a good precedent if they allowed the probe. If Lamichhane truly has nothing to hide then he should emerge unscathed from the probe, given that it is honest. As a new party that has championed anti-corruption and transparency, the RSP should be willing to come clean, instead of indulging in whataboutism. The longer it stays in government the more the RSP is looking like just another political party and that is not a good sign. The voting public takes notice and they might not fare as well during the next round of elections. The party should perhaps take a closer look at how the Maoists fared during the second Constituent Assembly. The public is very quick to turn on new parties when they see that the ‘new’ are very much like the ‘old.’
Monarchists out in force again
On Tuesday, a large rally led by the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) caused much mayhem in Kathmandu after police fired tear gas and water cannons and baton-charged rallygoers. The ‘protestors’ were rallying to bring back the Hindu monarchy and Nepal’s status as a Hindu state when they attempted to enter the ‘prohibited zone’ leading the police to use force to disperse them. These rallies seem to be getting larger each time but there’s really no way to tell as no one keeps track of how many people are in attendance. The RPP claims numbers in the thousands but that’s debatable.
Still, it should be a cause for concern that such rallies are getting more and more frequent and their numbers only seem to be growing. The more the current crop of parties dither away their time in power indulging in petty politicking, the more dissatisfaction is going to grow. As of yet, the people do not overwhelmingly seem to want the monarchy back. If they did, the RPP would’ve won a majority in Parliament. It didn’t, but it did come in at a respectable fifth position, and next election, if things continue to go the way they are now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they come in fourth or even third. The people are frustrated and, understandably, they are looking for an alternative, even if that alternative is to go back into the past.
So on the one hand we have new forces like the RSP and on the other, we have older forces like the RPP. The traditional mainstream parties are caught in the middle and unless they change their ways, voters will gravitate towards these two poles. But these two parties are not too different. While the RSP has not voiced support for a Hindu monarchy, it is just as skeptical of federalism as the RPP. And that too is a result of the major parties actively sabotaging federalism by undercutting the provinces. The parties have refused to pass legislation that would allow the provinces to function better, leaving them toothless. The public, however, only sees that the provinces don’t seem to be doing much of anything; they rarely look into why the provinces are so ineffectual. And so, public sentiment is largely negative when it comes to the provinces.
It is easy to look back on an idealized past when things are bad. But like I’ve said countless times before, a vote for the monarchy is not just a vote for Gyanendra but for his entire hereditary line. Let’s forget ideology and just look at things practically. After Gyanendra, we would have Paras, the philandering habitual drug user who’s had multiple heart attacks. Then, after Paras, we would have Hridayendra, a child who is so disconnected from the country that he barely even knows what is going on and cannot even speak a Nepali language properly. Is this really what the RPP wants to bring back?
I think that’s all I’ll say for this week. It’s New Year’s Eve and I’ll leave you with a depressing deep dive to welcome the new year. My apologies in advance, and a Happy New Year 2081 to everyone.
The deep dive: The air we breathe is killing us
Tomorrow is New Year’s Day according to the Nepali calendar and most of the Kathmandu Valley will be welcoming the new year under protective masks and eyewear amidst bouts of coughing and rubbing the eyes. Kathmandu is once again among the list of world cities with the worst air pollution. On Sunday evening, the air quality index for Kathmandu was above 400 — hazardous levels according to the United States’ Environment Protection Agency. At the time of writing, on Friday, Kathmandu’s AQI is 173, or unhealthy.
This is not a new thing for residents of the Valley. In fact, this perennial drop in air quality is becoming so routine that I’m afraid the authorities and the people both will get used to it. Every year, around this time of the year, wildfires begin to rage across the country, leading to rising levels of smoke and particulate matter in the air. All this pollution rises into the air and finds its way into valleys like Kathmandu where the geomorphology doesn’t allow the pollutants to escape. Other reasons too contribute to the drop in air quality, like emissions from vehicles and factories and cross-border pollution. But by and large, wildfires are the immediate cause of this apocalyptic environment we in Kathmandu are experiencing at this moment.
Take a look at this map, for instance:
This map, from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), which utilizes satellites to track forest fires around the world, shows active forest fires in Nepal over the past week. All of those red dots that you see across the country map are individual forest fires. So why are there so many forest fires? Let’s take a deeper look.
The primary and most obvious reason is climate change. Rising temperatures cause soil and foliage to dry more and combust in the heat, leading to more intense fires. Seasonal rainfall, which once acted as a dampener on forest fires, is also more erratic now, causing droughts across the country. This combination leads to both natural and unnatural forest fires. By natural I mean forest fires that occur spontaneously as a result of the accumulation of dry leaves and rising temperatures while unnatural fires are those caused by human activities. Often, as people venture into the woods to collect firewood and thatch, they can inadvertently cause fires. Or, they carry out controlled burns that are supposed to reduce the deadwood and allow new plants to grow. Such controlled fires are often necessary to prevent larger blazes, which is what communities living in and around forests have been doing for decades, if not centuries. But these days, due to changing climate patterns and rising temperatures, controlled fires do not remain controlled anymore and tend to escalate into raging fires that consume thousands of hectares of forests.
There is a self-reinforcing phenomenon at work here. Trees are carbon sinks that capture greenhouse gases like CO2 and prevent them from accumulating in the atmosphere. When healthy trees burn, they immediately release all the captured carbon into the environment. This also means that without healthy trees to act as carbon sinks, greenhouse gas emissions will remain in the atmosphere, warming up the earth and again contributing to climate change. The fires themselves too release all manner of soot, smoke, and particulate matter that linger in the air and lead to a rise in air pollution. So forest fires end up leading to more forest fires. What was once seen as an anomaly is now a yearly event that recurs with frightening ease.
Forest fires, however, are not the only contributors to air pollution. Valleys like Kathmandu are not healthy at other times of the year either. In fact, the only times when the air feels fresh is immediately after rainfall when the wind and the rains sweep away particulate matter. Emissions from vehicle exhaust remain a significant contributor to Kathmandu’s air pollution. Every year, the number of vehicles on the Valley streets increases with electric vehicles only making up a small number. Most new vehicles, especially motorcycles, are still powered by fossil fuels. Besides, it is also obvious that most large vehicles like buses and trucks do not meet emission standards. One just has to take a walk along the Ring Road to see how many buses and trucks emit black soot-laden smoke that cannot be healthy for anyone.
All of this is combined with emissions from industries and factories, the dust raised by ongoing construction projects, and open-air burning of household waste, leading to air that is unbreathable. According to a report from 2022, 42,000 Nepalis are estimated to die every year from complications related to air pollution. Another report states that air pollution is reducing the life expectancy of Nepalis by five years. Indeed, just 24 hours of breathing Kathmandu’s air when pollution is in the 200 AQI range is equivalent to smoking 6.84 cigarettes. So whether you are a smoker or not, Kathmandu’s air is very likely to give you lung cancer and/or emphysema.
Despite the very clear and present danger that air pollution presents to us, most policymakers and even ordinary Nepalis remain indifferent to the problem. For citizens of cities like Kathmandu, it is a fatalistic attitude of ‘it is what it is’. Most people don’t have the power to change to large-scale issues like air pollution and hence, resign themselves to suffering as their lot in life. They continue to ride their motorbikes and cars at every opportunity and burn garbage in their backyards as long as the neighbors don’t complain.
The apathy of those with the power to change things is more infuriating, though. The country’s most powerful political leaders live in Kathmandu and yet, they seem ready and willing to live in the city that is actively killing them. Most politicians and policymakers only acknowledge air pollution as an issue when things get bad enough that Kathmandu and a few other cities in the Madhesh end up on the world’s most polluted cities list. Even then, there is rarely any concrete action, only lip service. In 2021, the Government of Nepal endorsed the Air Quality Management Action Plan for Kathmandu Valley. This comprehensive plan assessed the various sources of air pollution in the Valley and recommended interventions. Among the interventions proposed are: ban on refuse burning; control of resuspension of dust from construction; control of vehicular exhaust emission; promotion of electric and hybrid vehicles; effective traffic management; improvement in public transport; promotion of walking and cycling; minimize emissions from brick kilns and other industries; and promote greenery in urban areas.
These are very broad recommendations that require coordination among numerous government agencies and so, they seem destined to fail. Among these recommendations, only the ban on burning waste has really been implemented. Kathmandu banned the burning of garbage in November 2022 but that hasn’t stopped citizens from torching their waste. More awareness campaigns and penalties are necessary to change behaviors that have been ingrained over decades. The rest of these recommendations will take years, if not decades, to be implemented in any real manner. Kathmandu’s public transport and traffic management both remain in dismal states while promotion of cycling has been limited to creating bike lanes that no one uses. When it comes to walking, Kathmandu seems to be actively against it, given how much of the city has been made unwalkable. As for control of dust from construction, that is something no one appears to be enforcing. The vast majority of construction projects make no efforts to limit the emissions of dust or to even control the spread of that dust through the use of dust curtains.
The best time for the government to act was ten years ago, when air pollution was manageable. The second-best time is now. But I am afraid that things are so far gone that the damage is irreparable. Even if stringent policies are put in place immediately, it will take at least a decade before results will be seen. The United States implemented its Clean Air Act in 1970 and it took at least two decades before things changed significantly. In the meantime, we will continue to breathe this toxic air and kill ourselves in the process. So it goes.
That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your emails, for the next edition of Off the Record.
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