ICYMI: Here are our top stories from Thursday, November 28
Here are some of the top stories from The Kathmandu Post (November 28, 2019).An illegal stone quarry at Lele in Godawari Municipality of Lalitpur district. Keshav Thapa/TKP
Here are some of the top stories from The Kathmandu Post (November 28, 2019).
Oli handed Dahal the party reins—and took it back just as quickly
Less than a week after Pushpa Kamal Dahal was made the executive chairman of the Nepal Communist Party, Co-chair KP Sharma Oli has pulled the rug out from underneath his co-chair, saying that he too is an executive chairman.
In an interview with Kantipur Television on Monday, Oli, who is also prime minister, said that he was not only the “other executive chairman” but also senior to Dahal, leaving analysts and party insiders to wonder what exactly is Dahal’s role in the party.
Government anxious to find new vendor as passport numbers dwindle
After cancelling a tender at the last minute, the KP Sharma Oli administration is now considering either seeking proposals from interested parties or calling another global tender to print passports, along with other secure materials.
With just 700,000 passports in stock, government officials are scrambling to prevent a passport crisis. The Passport Department has been issuing around 3,000 passports every day since the end of festival season, according to department officials. If this rate continues, the department’s stock will last just seven or eight months. It will take at least nine months to contract a foreign firm to print and supply passports following the due process, according to officials.
In Achham, domestic abuse is driving women to depression
According to data from Achham’s Bayalpata Hospital—which has a bureau exclusively dedicated to the treatment of the mentally ill—of the over 5,500 people it has treated over the past three years, women outnumber men by a great margin; for 4,071 women treated, there are just 1,681 men. The bureau was established three years ago.
When the women come to the hospital, they don’t show any apparent symptoms, but when they are led through the counselling process, they are often found to be suffering from depression, said Bharat Kadayat, a counsellor at the hospital. Kadayat said that among the women he has counselled over the years, most were victims of domestic abuse.
Why sand mining is rampant and what’s (not) being done to control it
Illegal and excessive excavations from streams and riverbeds have not only raised threats of environmental hazards but also taken the lives of people. On August 10, two men from Gajuri, who worked as laborers extracting sand in Dariyal stream, drowned in a sand pit made by the excavators. According to local residents, every single night, the smugglers use excavators in the streams and rivers to extract sand and other riverbed materials.
However, the rampant—and careless—excavation has hardly alarmed authorities, as sand mining continues unchecked in various parts of the country.
Here’s everything you should know about sand mining and what’s gone wrong in the quest to extract riverbed materials.
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