Nepal’s bandh culture

Bandhs, or strikes, are seemingly all the rage right now in Nepal, although from what I understand the bandh culture is nothing new here. Dislike something? Throw a bandh. Mad about something? Throw a bandh. Protesting something? Throw a bandh. Have an itch? Throw a bandh. Bad security? Bad wages? Bad hair day? Lack of landfill sites? Microbuses getting torched? Food prices too high? All of these things are acceptable reasons for strikes here in Nepal. So much so that bandhs are seemingly more common than mosquitoes after a nice summer rain. Take this past Friday for instance. Saturday’s newspaper reported 8 different bandhs across the country, two of them right here in Kathmandu. Earlier in the week, some upset students torched a microbus, so the Transportation Entrepreneur Union called a strike demanding better security for their drivers and increased vigilance dealing with acts of vandalism. The strike took place yesterday and continued into today leaving many people without ways to get around town. Now granted both of the demands being made are reasonable, important issues, that by all means need to be addressed. However, it would seem that there’s a logjam in the works somewhere as I doubt that this will solve the problem and instead has just caused 2 days of havoc for people trying to get around the city. The sidewalks at the local bus parks have been piled 6 deep with people waiting for the few vehicles that are actually still running. The one fortunate thing is that today is Saturday so most people are off from work anyway.

The next bandh that affected the city yesterday and today was a strike by the trash collectors due to a dispute over landfill space. Apparently all of the valley’s garbage is deposited in one place and people in that area are getting a bit upset about it (understandably). They’ve closed the area which has put a halt to trash collection in the valley leaving large stinking piles of garbage on the streets – not to mention leaving the government scrambling trying to find a new place for all the trash. Walking around yesterday I didn’t realize that a strike was on and just figured that they were a bit behind in pickup…wrong; how naïve of me. In addition to these two bandhs, there were 6 more around the country, bringing different aspects of daily life to a screeching halt. Now granted, a transportation bandh, or a garbage bandh are not quite as bad as the occasional city wide bandhs put on by the Maoists where literally everything gets shut down, but they’re still bad enough.

This brings me to the title of this post, “Nepal’s bandh culture”. Now I’m all for workers rights and unions and speaking out for what you believe in and all of that great stuff that usually keeps power in check and gives the little guys a voice. However, I have to call all of this into question here, because it seems to happen so often (for instance, according to the Himalayan newspaper, trash collection has been suspended on 53 separate occasions in the valley since 2005 causing there to be 207 days where trash could not be collected) that it has become ineffective. I’m not really sure what to suggest that would get things rolling, but I would like to suggest that the bandh is no longer the best approach.

**As a small amendment, I wrote this post and then went for a walk around the city to do some photographing. The trash situation is actually much worse than I had initially realized and if it continues into tomorrow and the next day I think some roads will start to be blocked by large heaps of trash.