Two weeks remain for the March 5 snap polls, and there is a familiar, suffocating stench of electoral promises in the air. Campaign vehicles, festooned in party flags, have started traversing each constituency, blaring songs of nation-building and unprecedented development. Yet, the campaigns mask a perilous disconnect between the rhetoric of party manifestos and the daily struggles of the people. The recent flurry of election manifestos is, for the most part, a collection of tall tales and hollow assurances, devoid of the issues that determine whether a family in the grassroots eats, drinks, or survives the night.

The political abandonment is most glaring in Madhesh province, where leaders float grand development dreams while nearly 45 million people are embroiled in a struggle for water. Only 24 percent of the province’s population has access to safe drinking water, and 600,000 have no access at all. Most household handpumps have run dry, forcing citizens to fetch water from deep borings dozens of times a day. The promise of 500 deep borings, grandiosely announced by former Prime Minister KP Oli during the 2025 water crisis in the province, has vanished in the absence of political will. A similar betrayal is also echoed in the hills of Palpa, where the ‘one house, one tap’ campaign—a seductive slogan from 2017—remains a cruel display of politicians’ false promises. Residents wake at 3am to queue at drying streams. Projects sit abandoned and incomplete due to a lack of political will and sustained funding.

For the grassroots, alongside the water insecurity is the terror of human-wildlife conflict, an issue that has been conveniently relegated to the footnotes of political agendas. In Bahundangi of Jhapa, the electoral cycle has become synonymous with the ‘elephant cycle’. For decades, successive leaders have pledged to maintain electric fences for safety. With over 100 people having lost their lives to elephant attacks in the district over the last two decades, those fences are broken monuments of failure. In Dhankuta, the ‘monkey menace’ has turned agriculture into a hellish endeavour. Farmers spend their days armed with catapults, guarding crops from marauding troops. Citizens have grown weary of politicians still proposing ‘commercial management’ or ‘special programmes’ during rallies. In Srilanka Tapu, a riverine island isolated by the Saptakoshi, the buzz of the March 5 election is non-existent because the people are too busy surviving. They sustain elephant attacks in winter and floods in the summer. With no reliable electricity supply, no schools beyond the fifth grade, and no bridge to reach medical care during the monsoon, the residents of the island live in a state of permanent abandonment.

In all of these cases, the tragedy extends beyond the loss of life and property. The grassroots are not asking for nation-building in the abstract but for a reliable water supply and protection from wildlife attacks. Water security and human-wildlife conflict management might be seasonal talking points for political leaders, but it is the difference between life and death for some voters. Political parties must understand that election manifestos that ignore the grassroots are useless documents. The candidates must stop reciting tall tales of development and start listening to the 3am water-seekers and the farmers guarding their fields by torchlight.