The government and usury victims have reached a four-point agreement on Monday.

The two sides reached the deal after the government agreed to form a three-member inquiry commission with a mandate to study the issue of loan-sharking and submit a report recommending solutions to end the illegal practice permanently. Representatives of the government and the struggle committee, who were holding talks since Sunday, reached the agreement.

With the signing of the four-point agreement, the struggle committee has announced it will withdraw the ongoing protests.

Joint Secretary Rudra Prasad Pandit, who is the head of the government talks team, and Abadesh Prasad Kishawaha, chairman of the struggle committee, signed the agreement in the presence of Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Rabi Lamichhane, who had taken the initiative to resolve the issue through negotiations.

The commission is mandated to investigate issues such as whether the victims were forced to sign any documents that stated the false amounts; whether the amount was inflated; whether the lenders have charged exorbitant interest rates or whether any other similar illegal activities had taken place.

The commission will study and collect such documents and classify them in different categories such as forged or illegal documents. Then, it will forward the cases to the department of money laundering or the concerned government agencies.

The government had earlier formed a similar commission led by former judge Gauri Bahadur Karki. The Karki-led commission resolved hundreds of similar cases and submitted its report before its tenure ended.

Hundreds of victims of usury—or ‘metre byaj’, as it is called colloquially in Nepal—arrived in Kathmandu walking for days all the way from Jhapa in the east and Kanchanpur in the west, among other districts, two weeks ago, to press the authorities to resolve the problem.

They were continuously staging protests near Singha Durbar, the central secretariat of the government, and in front of Parliament building in Baneshwar since they gathered in the capital city