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ICYMI: Here are our top stories from Sunday, April 28
Here are some of the top stories from The Kathmandu Post (April 28, 2019).Post Report
Here are some of the top stories from The Kathmandu Post (April 28, 2019).
A cup full of woes for tea estate workers
Tea estate workers in the eastern region have been on the warpath since April 1 demanding that factory owners implement the monthly minimum wage and social security scheme guaranteed by new labour and social security laws. All tea mills have been closed since then.
The government has made it mandatory for employers to pay industrial workers a minimum wage of Rs385 daily or Rs13,450 monthly and create a social security fund by this fiscal year, but tea factories have not implemented the rule. The agitating tea estate workers said that the factories had been paying them only Rs278 daily for the last nine months.
An ongoing standoff between tea estate workers and tea factories is expected to result in production losses of 20 percent this year as a large acreage of quality tea leaves remain unpicked.
Over 30,000 Nepalis still in forced labour, statistics bureau report says
A total of 31,338 individuals are in forced labour in Nepal, according to the Labour Force Survey 2017-18 unveiled by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
According to the International Labour Organization, forced labour refers to situations in which persons are coerced to work through the use of violence or intimidation, or by more subtle means such as accumulated debt, retention of identity papers or threats of denunciation to immigration authorities.
People are in forced labour, according to the survey, for—on an average—2.6 years out of the five years. Of the total people in forced labour, 56 percent are male and 17 percent are children.
Federal government is showing no signs of devolving power, chief ministers say
Without much headway during the inter-state council meeting, the tussle between the subnational governments and the federal administration seems unlikely to end anytime soon.
“Leaders in Kathmandu are still guided by their old mindset and they have not been able to internalise the fact that coordination is key to driving federalism forward,” Prithvi Subba Gurung, chief minister of Gandaki Province, told the Post.
One of the major bones of contention between the provinces and Kathmandu is the issue of security arrangements.
Provincials governments have objected to the federal government not only continuing with the chief district officers but also “empowering” them.
Province 2 in particular has prepared its own bill with the provision of having its own “district administrators”—a position parallel to CDOs, in a move that could further escalate the conflict.
Disaster incidents are on the rise in the country
As per the National Emergency Operation Centre's data, a total of 2,555 various catastrophic incidents were recorded in the country between April 13, 2016 and April 12, 2017. In that period, 482 people lost their lives, 49 went missing, 841 were injured and property loss amounted to over Rs2.93 billion.
The following year from April 13, 2017 to April 13, 2018, the number of incidents rose to 2,850 that was an 11.5 percent increase in big and small scale disasters. In that period, the devastating flood that ravaged various districts of Southern plains killed over 150 people and the toll from all types of disasters was recorded at 597, a surge of over 23 percent from the previous year.
However, the whopping upsurge in the number of similar tragedies was recorded last year. In the period between March April 14, 2018 and April 13, 2019, the number of disaster incidents in the country shot up by over 50 percent to 4,280, which killed 455 people in various parts of the country.
Meet the filmmaker who made a documentary out of her solo travel to Upper Dolpo
In 2017, Prasuna Dangol went on a solo trek to Upper Dolpo, an unfamiliar region to many from Kathmandu. As a part of the Solo Women's Travel Challenge, Dangol set out to show how women could travel just as easily as men. The trip in itself was inspiring, she says, but she also managed to make a documentary out of her travels. That documentary, ‘Dolpo Diary’, has gone on to win a number of awards and has introduced Dangol as a fresh new voice in Nepali documentary filmmaking. In a conversation with Sachitra Gurung, Dangol spoke about her experiences travelling to Dolpa, her work process and how she sees the Nepali filmmaking scene.
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