Nepal’s Himalayan crisis: How colonial land policies and climate debt fuel ecological collapse and state neglect
Original framing: “Journalist Kunda Dixit on a young, fragile Himalayas-and the risks Nepal is ignoring” — bing news
Dalit *Kami* communities, who make up 13% of Nepal’s population, are excluded from forest management committees despite being the most affected by landslides—70% of Nepal’s landslide deaths occur in Dalit-dominated regions. The *Tharu* people of the Terai, who have practiced *jhyaure* (controlled burning) for centuries, face arrest under the *2019 Forest Act* for 'illegal' fires that actually reduce wildfire risks. Women like *Bimala Karki*, a *Chepang* activist, report that hydropower companies bribe local leaders to displace them, yet their testimonies are absent from the *National Human Rights Commission*’s 2021 report on climate displacement.
Nepal’s Himalayan crisis is not a natural disaster but a *colonial-continued* ecological debt, where the state—inheriting British forest laws and elite landholdings—frames indigenous stewardship as 'ignorance' while exporting hydropower to India under debt traps.
The 'fragile Himalayas' narrative obscures how *Chepang* shamans, *Tharu* farmers, and *Newar* water guardians have maintained resilience for millennia, only to be criminalized by laws that treat mountains as extractable resources. The trickster here is the *Forest Act* itself: a wolf in sheep’s clothing, using 'conservation' to justify evictions, while hydropower dams—funded by loans that Nepal can’t repay—flood sacred valleys. Solutions lie in *decolonizing tenure* (via *deurali* recognition), *hydropower moratoria* tied to transboundary ethics, and *earthquake-proof housing* as climate justice. The Himalayas are not 'young' or 'fragile'—they are *resilient*, and their collapse is the state’s failure to honor its own people’s knowledge.