When I first moved to Nepal 16 years ago every few years I would read a report in the daily newspaper about the road network reaching a remote village. The driver and passengers would have garlands of marigolds draped around their necks, red tika pressed to their foreheads, and a celebration would follow. The reason was simple: most people were confident that more roads would bring more development.
Today’s guest has first-hand knowledge of the road-building phenomenon. Phurwa Dhondup is a native of Dolpo district who has studied the building of a major road in Humla district. Both places are in the Karnali, Nepal’s least developed region, and its most remote.
Phurwa is a Ph.D. student in geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. He does research on state-building and socio-environmental change in the Himalayan borderlands, and focuses on the intersections of Indigenous environmental governance, national and international conservation agendas, and infrastructure development in Dolpo.
Phurwa is quick to point out that he is not anti-road, and that building roads like the Hilsa-Simikot route in Humla will lead to structural transformation and positive benefits like easier access to health care. But he wants more people to go beyond the bad-road/good-road discourse to examine the process of road-building, specifically to identify the winners and losers and how their lives are changed.
If you enjoy this episode, please like, follow or subscribe to Nepal Now wherever you listen to podcasts. You can reach me at marty@martylogan.net and chat with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
One note: Phurwa uses the word bikas throughout our chat. It is the Nepali word for development.
Resources
Phurwa's paper — Challenging infrastructural orthodoxies: Political and economic geographies of a Himalayan road
Nepal Now social links
Thanks as always to Nikunja Nepal for advice and inspiration.
Music: amaretto needs ice ... by urmymuse (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/urmymuse/57996 Ft: Apoxode
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Nepal Now is produced and hosted by Marty Logan.
