Tag Archives: Kathmandu

More (mostly halfhearted) brand theft in Kathmandu

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In December I posted about some of the weirder instances of brand theft that go on in Kathmandu – when outlets steal the names of well-known brands to sell their wares.

I continue to see fresh examples every day. Some exploit the zeitgeist in a flagrant, cynical manner, like this eaterie. It doesn’t even have an internet cafe and I’m pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t branched out into the hospitality industry.

But at least they’ve done their research – they appear to know what Facebook looks like.

Can the same be said for the next outlet, a clothing store in the centre of town?
Someone should tell the owner that the legendary Belgian boy reporter is blonde, not black-haired.
And let’s hope there’s no Afterlife because Hergé will be choking on his celestial waffles if he has clapped his sharp eyes on this sinister rendering of Snowy:

The biggest sin of all, though, is not even using the correct spelling of the brand you are stealing. If lawyers from the pret-a-porter clothing giant Diesel ever get this far into south Asia, they’re more likely to wet their boot-cut jeans laughing than issue a lawsuit. So perhaps the store’s owners are being crafty rather than careless.

Have you spotted any counterfeit concessions, fake franchises, sham shops or bogus boutiques? Tell me about them in the comments section.

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Nepal Tibetans ‘suffocated’ by Chinese influence

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This post is based on an article I wrote for AFP, published on March 12, which can be found here.

Nepal has for decades been a safe haven for Tibetans fleeing China but activists fear that is changing (AFP, Prakash Mathema)

Ahead of this year’s commemorations of the 1959 Tibet uprising I talked to Tsewang Dolma, president of the local chapter of the Tibetan Youth Congress here in Kathmandu, to discuss her community’s fears for their future in Nepal.
We met at a cafe near a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal and Tsewang stirred her iced tea nervously as she spoke.
Despite being arrested twice and followed by “spies” she says are working for the Chinese secret service, Dolma is one of the few Tibetans in Nepal prepared to speak openly what they see as an increasingly hard line approach by the government to their community.
“It’s not easy because we have no freedom. We are refugees here. Things have changed and people feel very suffocated,” she told me.
For decades, Nepal has been a safe haven for Tibetans fleeing China but activists say their people’s peaceful existence is at threat because of Beijing’s growing influence over its Himalayan neighbour.
Campaigners believe the wave of protests against Chinese rule that began in Tibet in March 2008 and the resulting crackdown has transformed the attitude of Nepal’s government.
Arrests of activists in Kathmandu have become frequent in recent years and the periods of detention are getting longer, activists say.
In February, Nepal police arrested 13 students protesting in front of the United Nations headquarters in Kathmandu, releasing them only after they had spent two weeks in jail.
“They were just taking part in a human rights protest and they were arrested. Before, when people got arrested they would be released on the same night,” said Dolma, who has been detained twice in recent months.
“We get information that they got orders from China to be kept in detention for so long.”
Nepal-born Dolma said pre-emptive arrests and large-scale police deployment in her community were contributing to fear and insecurity.
“They don’t allow any Tibetan to do anything freely,” she told me.
“I don’t know what really changed but it’s all Chinese influence. It was bad but now it’s worse.”
At Saturday’s 1959 commemorations, Kathmandu police arrested 22 Tibetans for “suspicious activities” at demonstrations that were more muted than in previous years as hundreds of officers looked on.
For three decades Nepal welcomed Tibetans into the country after the uprising, issuing them with refugee identity certificates, known as the “RC”.
But the government has refused since 1998 to issue RCs to Tibetans, including children born in Nepal to refugee parents.
“I have a lot of friends who don’t have RCs and they face so many problems. They were born here but they don’t have citizenship,” said Dolma.
“If they want to go abroad for study, they can’t. And if you want to work in a bank they require Nepali citizenship documents.”
Analysts say while India has traditionally been the influential player in Nepal, China is making in-roads in a nation that is recovering after a decade-long civil war came to an end in 2006.
Impoverished Nepal, home to 20,000 exiles from Tibet, appears keen to seek further Chinese aid.

Arrests of Tibetan activists in Nepal are becoming more frequent, campaigners say (AFP, Prakash Mathema)

In January Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his Nepalese counterpart Baburam Bhattarai discussed investment from Beijing for infrastructure projects that could amount to billions of dollars.
In return, Nepal expressed support for Beijing’s “one-China” policy which states that Tibet is an integral part of the Chinese territory.
In the last few months rights groups including the International Commission of Jurists, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have voiced concerns over Nepal’s hard line on its Tibetan community.
And Tibetan groups such as the US-based International Campaign for Tibet say the change in attitude is increasingly apparent.
“The characterisation of peaceful Tibetan community activities and demonstrations as anti-Chinese clearly reflects China’s agenda in Nepal,” an ICT spokeswoman told me.
Chinese authorities declined to comment but Nepal’s Home Ministry said its policy was to arrest Tibetans for “agitation against the Chinese government in sensitive locations inside Nepal”.
“We have a policy for not allowing any activities against our friendly neighbour China,” said spokesman Shankar Prasad Koirala.

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Westerners bewitched by Nepal’s shamans

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Kirati shaman Parvati Rai coaxing snake spirits out of a young Nepali man who has "lost his soul". AFP PHOTO/Prakash MATHEMA

Covering Nepal for an international news agency takes you into all kinds of weird situations.
I recently took part in a shamanic exorcism in Kathmandu. Here is the account I wrote for AFP.

The shaman’s body begins shaking as she mumbles an ancient mantra to the syncopated beat of a dhyangro drum, coaxing snake spirits from a young Nepali man who has “lost his soul”.
Iron bells hanging around her white shirt ring as she jumps around her patient in a shamanic trance, her head dress of peacock feathers waving wildly as she springs up and flings her arms around him.
In the background, awestruck white Westerners in headbands and beads watch the ancient, animistic ceremony, not in a remote mountain pass or a jungle clearing but in a comfortable, 21st century house in suburban Kathmandu.
“The boy has lost his soul and we are helping him find it,” says Mohan Rai, the 80-year-old founder of the Shamanistic Studies and Research Centre Nepal and a man on a mission to restore what he sees as an dying art in the Himalayan nation.
After decades of modernisation when witch doctors were almost wiped out, “urban shamans” are enjoying a renaissance among Nepal’s metropolitan middle class and Westerners looking to be healed, cleansed or awakened, says Rai.
He has been on the front line of this renaissance since setting up his centre in 1988 to revive a practice he says “has been left behind” by science, technology and the big world religions.
“Shamanism is 75,000 years old. But it is dying out in the villages and I want to keep these traditions alive,” said Rai, who is highly critical of the religions and governments he believes have actively plotted to kill off the practice.
“I have thousands of students a year and, more and more, they are Westerners looking for something else where Western medicine has failed. Many of my students are medical doctors looking to integrate shamanism into their own practices.”
Shamans, known in Nepal as dhami-jhankris, claim to find the lost souls of the sick by travelling between three worlds — lower, middle and upper — connected by an upside down tree called Kalpa Vriksha, the tree of immortality.
They say they commune with the deities and spirits — both benign and malignant — inhabiting each world.
Tobias Weber, 33, a farmer from Germany travelling in Nepal, said he was drawn to shamanism after becoming interested in healing but disillusioned with the limitations of Western medicine.
“Shamanism can complement what doctors and nurses in the West are able to do. Clearly, if you have broken your arm you are probably going to go to a hospital but there is also so much you can get from the spiritual side of healing which people never get to experience.”

Rai with German traveller Tobias Weber. AFP PHOTO/Prakash MATHEMA

Rai, who is in polygamous marriages to two sisters and speaks English, German, Spanish, French, Sherpa, Tibetan and Hindi, has enjoyed a colourful life.
Born into a Bhutanese farming community, he grew up helping his father, “a powerful and well-known shaman” with healing rituals for the sick in his village.
He joined Nepal’s legendary Gurkha brigade aged just 17 and has been a trekking guide in Kathmandu and a mountain rescuer in Alps.
He first came across Nepal’s shamans when he was an assistant to foreign anthropologists trying to locate witch doctors among the country’s indigenous tribes.
He realised that shamanism was of great interest to the developed world and set up his research centre to spread the message, employing shamans from the Tamang, Rai, Sherpa and Gurung Himalayan mountain tribes.
In his centre sits a photograph of a six-year-old German boy Rai claims to have healed after the youngster, riddled with cancer, was given just two years to live.
He also relates the story of a paralysed man he helped to walk within just a few healing sessions.
Australian Laura Martino is taking a course at Rai’s centre and wants to help people in her home town of Melbourne reconnect with their spiritual side.
“I came here with a totally open mind, which I had to because of some of the amazing experiences I’ve had here, like trips to the mountains and sleeping in  graveyards.
“I think the Western world has lost something in its approach to healing and we really need to get in touch again with nature.”
Shamanism has had its critics, however, in a country where ancient superstitions can have a devastating effect.
In February a group of villagers accused a neighbour of witchcraft and burned her alive because their shaman had told them she was a witch.
The crime caused widespread revulsion, with Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai appealing to Nepalis not to listen to the injunctions of shamans.
“In villages especially, faith healers are from the local community while western medicine practitioners are from cities and towns and are often regarded as outsiders,” said Ravi Shankar, assistant professor at Manipal College of Medical Sciences in Pokhara, Nepal’s second city.
Many academics in the West believe that shamans rely on a powerful “placebo effect” — the tendency of any treatment, even an ineffective one, to show improvements in health simply because the recipient believes it will work.
Even doctors who distrust Nepal’s shamans have in the past relied on their services, training them to use rehydration salts to treat diarrhoea and cotrimoxazole antibiotics in pneumonia cases.
“There is the negative aspect where diseases like epilepsy and mental illness are regarded as entirely due to supernatural causes and modern medical treatment is neglected,” said Shankar.
“But then this was the case in the West also about 150 years ago.”

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Brand theft in Kathmandu

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Unless they’ve omitted HindoDisney from my city guide book, I’m pretty sure Kathmandu has hardly any global brands doing business in its hospitality and services industries.

The only two I can think of in fact are KFC and Pizza Hut which boast just four restaurants between them and are owned by the same parent company in any case (see AFP‘s 2009 story “Nepal tucks into first international fast-food chain“).

I’m not sure whether there’s a gap in the market for McDonald’s or Marks and Spencer. During a ten-year civil war that claimed more than 16,000 lives Maoist rebels targeted foreign ventures including Coke, Pepsi and Unilever.

But that ended five years ago. Recently Kathmandu has seen rapid growth in restaurants, shopping malls and supermarkets. KFC, for one, seems to be doing pretty well, having opened a second franchise a few weeks ago. While Kathmandu remains a poor city it has its middle-class like any other and one cannot help but conclude that the big brands are being slow on the uptake rather than shrewd. (Aside: KFC is not dismissed universally as low-culture in Asia the way it is in western Europe. In China, for example, eating in one of its restaurants is an aspirational activity – something that makes you look more middle class).

One interesting corollary of the squeamishness over Nepal is that the multinationals just do not care about protecting their brands here. So familiar high street names which aren’t exactly what they imply have sprung up like Walmart mushrooms all over Kathmandu.

Try ordering a Caramel Frappuccino® Light in here, for example. Go on – I dare you. You’ll get blank looks.

 

And this place doesn’t sell Apple’s iLife software suite. It doesn’t sell any Apple software. Which is probably just as well, since it only stocks PCs.

In the first case, the shop has stolen the name but not the look. In the second case, the misappropriation involves the entire brand and you would be forgiven for thinking it was some new kind of Apple Store.

Then there are the cases where the branding just looks incongruous, even if it has been sanctioned by the big multinational. In some parts of Kathmandu, literally every fourth or fifth outlet is a shop or cafe decked head-to-toe in the livery of either Coca-Cola or Pepsi. In this example the cafe is displaying its own name too but in many cases all you see is Coca-Cola branding.

In many examples the lettering looks hurried and in some cases is a mix of Roman script and the Devanagari alphabet. We should presume that this is all above board and that these businesses are getting cash from soft drink giants for advertising.

But are the money men checking that the outlets on which they are advertising are fully on board with the brand message?

There’s nothing ‘unique’ about this cafe, except perhaps that its menu offers no soft, fizzy drinks at all, let alone Pepsi.

The fridges of this establishment, on the other hand, are stocked with all the cola you could drink. But it’s Coke, not Pepsi.

Maybe I’ve got too much time on my hands but it strikes me that Big Business is missing a trick here.

Starbucks is more vigilant in China, where it protects its brand with a diligence that verges on… well, good brand management, I guess.

In 2006 the company won a legal action forcing Shanghai Xingbake Coffee Co Ltd to pay damages and to change its name (Starbucks translates as “Xingbake” in Mandarin) – even though Xingbake registered its name before Starbucks had entered the Shanghai market.

Similarly, Apple has been the plaintiff in trademark and copyright infringement legal action all over the world (although the most notable cases have been against big rivals rather than small-time firms). These lawsuits include claims against Woolworth Ltd in Australia, the Victoria School of Business and Technology in British Columbia, Canada, and even New York City (that’s right – the Big APPLE).

The first question companies usually ask before launching legal action is: “Will this be worth it?” There is a long list of potential pitfalls to weigh against the advantages of protecting your brand.

One, obviously, is the cost. Trademark infringement lawsuits often end up setting the plaintiff back to the tune of between $250,000 and $750,000 if they have to prosecute all the way through to trial.

Another is that the legal position can be complicated and nebulous. How easy is it going to be to sue for trademark infringement in a market where you have no presence? How likely is it that the judiciary in a tinpot banana republic will uphold international copyright law? [Before I get complaints, Nepal is not a tinpot banana republic, by the way - although they do grow excellent bananas here. Banana Republic, however, does strike me as great name for a chain of milkshake bars.]

Thirdly, is there potential for doing more harm to your brand than good? A big firm might look like it is fighting the good fight if it stops a rival taking advantage of 50 years’ worth of hard-earned goodwill. But closing down a cafe with a similar name in a third world city risks making you look petty.

So how come Kathmandu gets away with it? Could it be one or all of the above reasons?

Or should we simply conclude that we’re just not on the radar here? If this is the thinking then it offers a rather depressing picture of Nepal’s business outlook: that – in the eyes of the big global brands – it’s not a viable marketplace now and probably never will be.

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Nepal’s ‘Brokeback Everest’ courts lesbian cinemagoers

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by Frankie Taggart

A version of this article was first published by AFP on November 16, 2011. The original can be found here.

Nisha Adhikari (left) and Dia Maskey as the star-crossed lesbian lovers in Snow Flowers

Kiran wanders aimlessly, oblivious to the traffic and wiping tears from her bloodshot eyes as struggles to take in the devastating news that the love of her life is about to marry someone else.
The poignant vignette is not real life but one of the final scenes to be filmed in a new love story due to hit cinema screens in Nepal next year. But this is no ordinary melodrama, for the object of Kiran’s desire is a woman.
The affair plays out in Snow Flowers, a breakthrough lesbian love story already being dubbed “Brokeback Everest” and set to be the first feature film to deal with the taboo subject of gay relationships in the 60-year history of Nepalese cinema.
With filming having wrapped on schedule in Kathmandu ahead of the international festivals circuit and a general release in spring, the only question is whether the public in the deeply-religious nation will be ready.
The movie, directed by Paris-based film-maker Subarna Thapa, stars two of Nepal’s leading actresses, Dia Maskey and Nisha Adhikari, in a story of two women tormented by their feelings for one another.
“It’s two individuals falling in love and facing all the controversy and restrictions, and mental, emotional and physical traumas of being a lesbian in Nepal,” Adhikari said.
“It’s a simple love story with a lot of complications.”

Nepalese cinema actress Nisha Adhikari films a scene in Patan for the forthcoming film "Snow Flowers". Photo: AFP

Local media have dubbed the film “Brokeback Everest” in a reference to Ang Lee‘s gay cowboy love story “Brokeback Mountain“, which grossed more than $178 million worldwide after its release in 2005.
Industry observers do not expect Snow Flowers to do that kind of business but are keenly awaiting the reaction of audiences in Nepal, a conservative, mainly Hindu country that nonetheless has some of the most progressive policies on homosexuality in Asia.
Adhikari, 25, says the film is a first as it deals with the turmoil experienced by same-sex couples in Nepal, whereas previously gay people have always been depicted in Nepalese cinema as figures of fun.
“The entire movie is based on the trauma — what it is like not being able to come out and live your life because there are so many restrictions,” she told AFP.
“There is no liberty in not living your life the way you want, irrespective of who you are attracted to sexually. This movie will be an eye-opener for a lot of people who have just viewed these issues very superficially and who think these are issues that can be easily ignored.”
Quite how the film will go down remains to be seen, although many argue that the signs are positive.
Three years ago, the country’s Supreme Court ordered the government to enact laws to guarantee the rights of gays and lesbians after a gay rights pressure group filed a petition.
Meanwhile the country’s new constitution, currently being drafted by lawmakers, is expected to define marriage as a union between two adult individuals, regardless of gender, and to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.
For Sunil Pant, a Nepalese lawmaker and the only openly gay parliamentarian in south Asia, it is not a question of whether Nepal is ready for Snow Flowers but rather whether society has any hope of progress without a liberal film industry.
“Nepal always been tolerant and we are now really ready to treat each other equally,” he said.
“It’s also about freedom of expression and our right to be able to watch films about our lives and issues — at least occasionally. I am excited and can’t wait to see the film released in Nepal.”
Nepali films, said to have begun with D.B. Pariyar’s Satya Harishchandra in 1951, are seen mainly by cinemagoers from the poor working class, while the middle class and elites tend to watch Hindu and English-language movies.
Chaitanya Mishra, a sociology professor at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, is not optimistic about the mainstream reaction to Snow Flowers,    which began shooting in August in Kathmandu and Pokhara.
“I think that news, films and other media on same-sex relationships will not be accepted or find many supporters as such if we are looking for acceptance and support from a majority of the adult population,” he told AFP.
But he added that the film could be a huge comfort to people already struggling with gay relationships, demonstrating that “they may not be alone and that there may be others like them out there”.
“That is bound to give them immense relief and unburden them of a huge ‘dirty secret’, he added. “It will start them on a journey to humanise such a relationship.”
The makers of Snow Flowers hope it will open Nepal up to a new genre of gay cinema and progress is already underway, with recent short films dealing with homosexuality and Nepali documentary Struggle Within being screened at the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival last year.
“No, the Bagmati was not set fire in reaction to the film screenings,” said Basanta Thapa, the festival’s curator.

Nepalese film director Subarna Thapa talking about "Snow Flowers" in Kathmandu. Photo: AFP

“Nepali society by and large is tolerant to such issues, unlike in India where the screening of Fire in 1998 caused a public stir fanned primarily by the right wing.
“The central theme of the film was lesbianism and was directed by Deepa Mehta, a film director of international repute… The same film, after many years of its release, was screened in Kathmandu and nothing happened here.
“So my own guess is that the film in the making will not attract any trouble from the audience.”
Snow Flowers director Suwarna Thapa says he is not interested in simply showing Nepal “what lesbians do”, but rather to tell a simple love story from an angle never approached before.
“It’s not a shocking film, like war movies or propaganda films, but there will be some impact in Nepali society,” he told AFP.
“Nepal is changing but it cannot be changed by the day after tomorrow. It takes time — it’s a long journey.
“Our Maoist revolution took 10 years to bring about change. Society and culture takes its time.”
Indeed, Snow Flowers is unlikely either to scandalise or titilate audiences expecting to see bared flesh as the relationship plays out through longing glances rather than explicit depictions of sex.
“This is an issue people would like to cover up in society. Maybe more than half the population can relate to the movie because people here totally ignore being bisexual,” said Adhikari, who shortened her long, carefully coiffeured hair for the role.
“Maybe people will go and see it just to see two women romancing — who knows?”

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Google helps track Nepal typhoid

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Families using a communal water well in Kathmandu. These wells have been identified as a major source of typhoid outbreaks [Image courtesy of Stephen Baker

by Frankie Taggart

This is based on my article for AFP published on October 17. The original can be read here.

Scientists announced this week they had combined cutting-edge gene sequencing technology with Google Earth to accurately map the spread of typhoid in Kathmandu for the first time.

The Nepalese capital was described in a 2008 study as “a typhoid fever capital of the world”, with thousands of cases a year reported, but outbreaks have been hard to chart in a city where streets are rarely given names.

Researchers say they have used GPS signalling and the latest DNA sequencing techniques to plot the course of the disease — and have discovered the source of outbreaks is usually communal water spouts.

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Google Earth map of Kathmandu showing locations of the residences of confirmed typhoid infections and the 42 functional water spouts nearby. [Image courtesy of Stephen Baker/Google Earth

The research, published in the journal Open Biology on Sunday, was carried out by scientists at the Vietnam-based Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme and the Oxford University Clinical Research units in Kathmandu and Ho Chi Minh City.

You can read it for yourself here.

“Until now, it has been extremely difficult to study how organisms such as the typhoid-causing bacteria evolve and spread at a local level,” said Stephen Baker, a scientist with Oxford University’s Vietnam unit.

“Without this information, our ability to understand the transmission of these diseases has been significantly hampered.

“Now, advances in technology have allowed us for the first time to create accurate geographical and genetic maps of the spread of typhoid and trace it back to its sources.”

Health workers visited typhoid patients’ homes and used GPS technology to capture the exact location, which was then plotted onto Google Earth, which maps the Earth by superimposing images from satellites and aerial photography.

They took blood samples from hospitalised patients to isolate the organism — which mutates as it spreads — and allow analysis of its genetic make-up to identify where the disease had started.

The researchers found that people living near communal water spouts and those living at a lower elevation were at by far the greatest risk of contracting the disease.

“Improvements in infrastructure are fundamental to the control and elimination of typhoid”, said Baker.

Recent advances in DNA sequencing have allowed scientists to accurately track the spread of some diseases by measuring mutations in the pathogen’s DNA when the DNA replicates.

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Nepal considers Eve-rest rooms for climbers caught short

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Should Everest's South Base Camp get public toilets? (photo courtesy: tourochina.co.uk)

We’ve all been there: the stomach starts gurgling as last night’s curry reminds you it has yet to complete its epic voyage through you.
But you are on a remote expedition of your own, and not exactly best placed to head for the nearest toilet block, whistling the Marseillaise, with copy of the Racing Post tucked under your arm.
You frantically look for signs to the public conveniences and then remember you are more than 29,000 feet above sea level, on the roof of the earth, and more likely to bump into a snow leopard than a palatial toilet block with pristine marble floors and gold taps.
This is the dilemma faced by the thousands of trekkers who brave the elements to head to Everest every year, minds preoccupied more with the challenge of ascending the world’s tallest mountain than what the toilet paper will be like when they get there.
There is only one answer on such occasions. Well, two: you can always bring a cork with you, I suppose.
For the rest of us, there is no option, you have to go where you are. Polite trekkers bring a contingency with them, the euphemistically-named “expedition can”, which sounds more like a sports drink than a repository for your waste.
But not all trekkers are polite, and this is becoming a real problem for the groups who are trying to keep Everest nice for the rest of us.
A partial solution may be in the offing, however.  
Environmental group Eco Himal has suggested that the Nepal government consider installing portable toilets at Everest’s South Base Camp.
Expeditions would do a better job of keeping the place clean if they and their porters had somewhere civilised to go when nature called, Eco Himal says.
My report for AFP can be read on the Daily Telegraph’s website, here.
Everest is littered with the detritus of past expeditions, including human waste and mountaineers’ corpses, which can take decades to decompose because of the extreme cold.
There is no official figure on how much trash has been left on the mountain, but the debris of 50 years of climbing has given Everest the name of the world’s highest dumpster.
The privately-funded Eco Everest Expedition, a Nepal-based coalition of environmentalists campaigning to keep the mountain clean, has collected more than 13 tonnes of garbage, 400 kilos of human waste and four bodies since 2008.
Nepal’s Sherpa people, who are Buddhists and believed to be of Tibetan origin, make up most of the population in the Everest region and have long revered the world’s highest peak as sacred.
I spoke to Wangchhu Sherpa, of the Everest Sumiteers Association in Kathmandu today. He believes at least 10 tonnes of rubbish remain on the mountain and he feels a government blacklist for tour groups who cannot account for all their belongings when they return from Everest – including containers of human waste – might be a better idea than a few toilets at base camp.
But are we realistic to expect these rules to enforced?
With the financial crisis deepening around the world, we habitually – and somewhat myopically – line up the environment as the first casualty of our cost-cutting.
In one of the poorest countries on earth, it seems unlikely that successive governments are going to want to pay for hundreds of inspectors to ensure people are looking after Everest.
The simple solution, as with so many environmental issues, is that people grow up and realise that it is incumbent on them, not governments, police or the courts, to ensure that our planet is looked after.

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Time to ban cars from downtown Kathmandu?

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Traffic chokes Kathmandu's central streets. But could we leave the cars at home?

UPDATE ON Saturday, October 22 2011: Since I wrote the post below it appears the real picture is even worse than I had anticipated.
A story in today’s Republica newspaper citing new figures from the Metropolitan Traffic Police says there are now 800,000 vehicles on the Kathmandu Valley’s 1,500km road network. Maths fans: that’s a vehicle every 1.875 metres. Given that the average car is more than twice as long as this we can see the extent of the problem.
The article also tells us the average speed of vehicles at peak times in central Kathmandu is 15-20km per hour (9-12mph). The Kathmandu Valley – a seething metropolis without a single set of traffic lights – has 965 road cops struggling to cope with a workload which would require nearly 1,400 officers.
Ganesh Raj Rai, the embattled chief of the Met Traffic Police, wants the government to build flyovers. This strikes me as an ugly, costly, shortsighted solution. At the current rate of increase in cars, they too would be jammed soon after construction. The only answer is to try to regulate the unsustainable increase in traffic through a congestion charge or an outright ban in the worst areas of gridlock. Some sort of credible long-term mass public transport strategy is also long overdue. Original post below:

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At dawn, before the taxi and minibus drivers start work, before the cacophany of thousands of motorbikes drowns out the courting call of the black eagle, Kathmandu is lovely — one of the loveliest cities in the world.
But by 7:30am it is ugly, its roads gridlocked, its beauty despoiled by the internal combustion engine.
The traffic is the first thing you notice when you arrive in Kathmandu – not the elegant cobbled streets, nor the ornate palaces, not the breathtaking stoupas or even the mountains. Not the mystique and the spirituality of one of the most bewitching and beguiling cities on earth. Just the traffic.
Some 500,000 buses, trucks, cars and other vehicles ply the capital’s congested roads – the equivalent of one carbon-belching motor for every third man, woman and child (compared with the national average of one for every 10).
It’s hard to describe the driving to anyone who has never visited Nepal but ‘chaotic’ certainly does not do justice to the lawless bedlam that characterises Kathmandu’s roads.
Those who have tried to negotiate the capital on a bicycle - as I do, every day – will know what I am talking about. If they lived to tell the tale.
There are a handful of rules and they are seldom followed. ‘It’s my way or the highway,’ would roughly encapsulate the ethos.
No one gives way anywhere, under any circumstance - trucks to cyclists, pedestrians to cars, taxis to motorbikes, anyone to ambulances. You have to assume that if there is a car in your line of sight it is about to pull out in front of you. It doesn’t matter if it is on a side street, an approach to a roundabout, or even unoccupied: within a second or two it will be blocking your path.
I began to get a feel for the vagaries of Nepal’s version of road safety the very first time I took my bike out when I was forced off the road by a minibus with six goats – alive, and standing up – tethered to the roof rack.
Why do I chose to cycle amid all this madness? Because I can get to almost any destination in the capital quicker on a bike than in a car, without really breaking a sweat.
Some people have described this situation as organised chaos – as if there were some byzantine, unspoken code which westerners just don’t get, as if somehow it just works.
But it doesn’t.
The traffic accident statistics in Nepal do not make pretty reading. It doesn’t do to compare numbers of fatalities between cities in Nepal and, say, England as there are too many factors such as vehicle numbers and traffic speed which make the exercise meaningless. You are not comparing like with like.
But here is a horrifying statistic: in a 2003 study of 229 post-mortem examinations at a hospital near the capital, 110 deaths were due to road traffic accidents. If the research is representative – and other studies have yielded similar results – nearly half of all premature deaths in Nepal are due to road accidents.

As an aside, here are some more numbers:

Number of accidents in Kathmandu last year, according to the Metropolitan Traffic Police: 2,765.
Number of deaths: 137
Serious injuries: 720.
Month in which highest number of vehicular accidents occurs: July (see study here)
Most dangerous day: Sunday
Most dangerous time of day: Late afternoon/early evening

And, finally, number of pedestrianised streets in Kathmandu: one.

It’s not that people are averse to walking — according to the Clean Air Network Nepal 18 per cent of daily trips are made entirely on foot, and of the 56.5 percent of commuters who use public transport, a large percentage walk part of their daily commute. And not just to the nearest bus stop.
But the city was not designed as a place for people and vehicles to share. There are almost no pavements in the narrow streets of downtown Kathmandu. Elsewhere pedestrian crossings are ignored.
Crossing the road is redolent of the 1980s video game Frogger (play it here - not now, after you’ve finished reading this): you step out in front of one line of traffic and hope you don’t get squashed, only to have to repeat the Sisyphian task endless times before getting to the other side and encountering the next road.
Researchers from the Asian Development Bank walked 48 Kathmandu streets and interviewed hundreds of members of the public for a recent study on the pedestrian-friendliness of Asian cities.
Kathmandu got a “walkability” score of 559, compared with dirty, overcrowded, polluted Bangkok’s 121. A lower score is better.
I won’t dwell on the environmental effects of all this traffic except to say that Kathmandu’s jams are not made up of green-conscious Toyota Priuses or fuel-efficient Smart cars. If you don’t wear a face mask and wrap-around shades when you are cycling you arrive at your destination with Marlboro lungs and eyes that feel like hot pickled onions.
The valley is especially vulnerable to air pollution due to rapid and haphazard urbanisation and its bowl-like topography which restricts wind movement and traps in the fumes. In winter you get a heat inversion, a kind of mini-greenhouse effect caused by cold air from the Himalayas getting trapped under a layer of warmer air which acts as a lid, sealing in the pollutants.
A government white paper on pollution in the capital points out that particulate matter in the air is thought to have increased by 82 per cent over the last 15 years.
During general strikes – known as banda days - Kathmandu returns to the pleasant city  it must have been before Henry Ford invented the assembly line. The hues are vital, the parks are verdant and the air is crisp, at least, if not exactly fragrant.
The dust, smoke and noise has become so unbearable many people now look forward to these strikes – a blight on the lives of ordinary people in every other way.
“It was only during banda days that I felt somehow able to breathe well. It was also fantastic to see so many children playing outside,” says Anil Bhattarai in an op-ed for the Kathmandu Post.
So why not at least pedestrianise Thamel, the city’s central tourist district? It has been tried before but the naysayers have always won the day. You will have heard the arguments against – access for deliveries, disability access, the taxi trade – ad nauseum.
But these problems are just dealt with in other cities like Cophenhagen, where pedestrianisation has worked. They are not insurmountable.
It is odd that no major political force in Nepal has ever made day-to-day walkability, breathability, liveability, a focus of the agenda when the poor air quality and noise pollution that chokes the life out of Kathmandu is the capital’s biggest daily challenge.

 

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Is Kathmandu ready for the ‘big one’?

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Experts say Kathmandu is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world (AFP/File, Prakash Mathema)

by Frankie Taggart

This post is modified from my article for AFP which was originally published on  September 21, 2011 and can be found here.

I had just changed rooms at my hotel in downtown Kathmandu when we were hit by the September earthquake which went on to claim more than a hundred lives at the remote junction between Nepal, India and Bhutan. 
I had finished transferring my stuff when I noticed my door banging open and shut. I went  to investigate and noticed the floor swaying from side to side.
We all ran down the stairs in various stages of dress (me in bare feet in the torrential monsoon rain) and we gathered outside, clear of the building, and waited for news.
After half an hour there had been no aftershocks so I got back into the hotel to get my laptop, mobile and find out what I could.
The death toll in Kathmandu itself was mercifully low in the end - three people were killed when a wall collapsed at the British embassy.
In the coming days, as the extent of damage in northern India became clear, there was sense that Kathmandu had “got away with it” and would not be so fortunate when the inevitable ”Big One” came.
Experts say Kathmandu is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world with an overdue earthquake predicted to kill tens of thousands of people and leave survivors cut off from international aid.
British geologist Dave Petley described the latest tremor, as a “wake-up call” for this overcrowded capital, home to between two and five million people – depending on what and who you count – and connected to the outside world by just three roads and one airport runway.
“The main area of concern is in central and west Nepal, where there has not been a large earthquake for a long period,” Petley told me after the 6.9-magnitude quake damaged hundreds of homes in the east of the country.
“This is an earthquake-prone area, so this suggests that there is a large amount of energy stored,” he said.
Nepal is a highly seismic region, lying above the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates that created the Himalayas, and major earthquakes have hit the Kathmandu Valley every 75 years on average over recent centuries.
One quake destroyed a quarter of homes in Kathmandu 77 years ago, and geologists believe the area is at immediate risk of an 8.0-magnitude tremor — ten times the size of last year’s Haiti quake which killed more than 225,000 people.
The Thamel area of downtown Kathmandu is a maze of narrow, winding roads where rickshaws and cars jostle with cows to squeeze past dilapidated clay, brick and timber houses.
“The building stock is not seismically strengthened, suggesting that in a big earthquake there will be large numbers of building collapses,” said Petley, of the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Britain’s Durham University.
GeoHazards International, a US-based research group, has measured the likely death toll from a quake of 6.0 magnitude or higher hitting cities in Asia and the Americas. Kathmandu topped the list of 21 cities with 69,000 potential deaths, ahead of Istanbul and New Delhi.
The Kathmandu Valley has experienced rapid, uncontrolled urbanisation in the past few years and the lack of infrastructure and deep-rooted poverty leave it desperately underprepared for an earthquake, experts say.
Building codes are rarely enforced, few emergency drills are carried out, and the fact that Kathmandu lies on the site of a prehistoric lake filled with soft sediment also exacerbates the risk.
The one single-runway airport and all three access roads would likely be destroyed in a major quake, meaning the city could be stranded. GeoHazards president Brian Tucker told me that researchers had compared the probability of a child in Kathmandu dying because an earthquake destroyed a school with the probability of the same situation in Tokyo.
“The child in Kathmandu was 400 times more likely to die. This inequity is intolerable,” he said.
The National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), established after a 6.5-magnitude tremor killed more than 700 people in eastern Nepal in 1988, has launched a programme to make school buildings more quake-resistant.
According to NSET, if a 7.0 magnitude quake hit Kathmandu, 200,000 people would die, another 200,000 would be severely injured, 1.5 million would be made homeless and 60 percent of homes would be destroyed.
“We have to take this risk very seriously and we have to assume the worst,” UN humanitarian coordinator in Nepal Robert Piper told the Kathmandu Post the day after the quake .
“It’s the right thing to do, which is to assume this could happen again tomorrow or in 10 years — we really don’t know.”

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