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VIEW POINT #21 15 - 21 December 2000 20 pages Rs 20 Beetlemania 10-11 Under My Hat Kathmandus Mating Season 20 EXCLUSIVE SHRIBHAKTA KHANAL ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ Just do IT here may be a row brewing between t India and Nepal over bilateral trade, but in the vast underground Indo-Nepal ganja business things couldn’t be smoother. In this narcotic free market, the prices are fixed in advance, officials are properly greased, and the only laws that apply here GANJAcameras. Lalit Bahadur Praja was having a NATION are the laws of supply and demand. chat with the cops who came to his Intrepid Indian traders have begun to homestead. He told them: “Look, I don’t venture deep into Nepal’s midhills have food, I survive on roots, supplying marijuana seeds on credit, I cannot afford rice. Even providing technical know-how, and even God protects the poor.” The agricultural extension to subsistence farmers policemen spared his crop. Nepal finally has an Information to set up plantations. They come back at For subsistence farmers in Technology (IT) strategy. “We’ve harvest time to pay for the ganja crop and Makwanpur, Bara, Parsa and missed the industrial revolution and take it away in trucks, ox-carts or porter Dhading, the marijuana trade is a the green revolution, but we don’t want back. Our investigation shows that Nepal is godsend. They buy marijuana seeds to miss this one,” said Surendra growing 3 million kg of ganja (dried from Indian suppliers at Rs 1000 per Chaudhary, our S&T minister who is a marijuana plants) and charas (concentrated kg on credit, the Indians tell them how self-confessed fan of India’s resin) every year with a street value of Rs 6 to nurture the plant, about weeding, cybercrat, Chandrababu Naidu. billion for “export” to India every year. But irrigation and harvesting techniques. The Chaudhary reckons Nepal can earn don’t look for this data in any official older farmers don’t need to be taught—they Rs10 billion from exporting IT bilateral trade figures because the entire used to grow marijuana before the Nepal products in five years. Nepal wants to industry is illegal. The cultivation and trade government was persuaded to ban model itself after Naidu’s Andhra is going on with the full knowledge (and marijuana in 1973 under pressure from the Pradesh, but the private sector says usually the connivance) of local US government after US aid to Nepal was the government has got one thing government, police, and even Maoist cadre doubled to compensate for the loss of wrong: Indian industry gets duty-free who provide protection to villagers against revenue. hardware and software imports. In official harassment. The peasants plant the seeds and can grow Nepal, we still tax the knowledge Just 20 km south of Kathmandu Valley up to 10 kg of ganja in one kattha Dirt poor Nepali villagers have a new economy. Equipment coming into the in the neglected and roadless regions of (0.3 hectares) of land. In the more suitable proposed IT Park in Banepa will have Makwanpur District, Tamang and Chepang climate and moist sandy soils of Makwanpur cash-crop: they are growing marijuana a one-percent duty for five years. There villagers who never grew enough food to and Dhading, one kattha can yield as much as have been no major investors in feed their families are turning over their 20 kg. When the Indian trader returns, he in illicit plantations that produce Rs 6 Nepal since 1997, and from the look terraces to ganja. Even in the dry season, subtracts the advance he gave for the seeds and of it, the new policy is not going to the well-maintained farms are lush with pays Rs 3000 per kg of ganja in the lean billion worth ganja annually for the change that. Here’s a tip for an mature marijuana plants ready for harvest. season. But the same crop sold to a Nepali amendment: allow duty-free hardware Watchtowers provide a lookout against middleman will not get the farmer more than Indian market. and software imports and provide police patrols that sometimes carry out half- Rs 1000 during harvesting. “If you can sell ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ incentives to this dollar-earning hearted raids to destroy crops. Villagers told directly to the Indians you earn more,” one ○○○○○○○○○○ industry. us police only destroy the crops of those farmer told us. “But I sell my crop to the After walking five hours from Manahari, for fear of Maoist attacks. The villagers who haven’t paid them off, usually the really village headman so I get less.” Another farmer, 30 km east of Hetauda, you are in the are wary of strangers: anyone who doesn’t Paramilitary poor peasants. But they aren’t complaining, Phulmaya Praja, says middlemen often cheat heart of Makwanpur’s ganja country. At look visibly Indian, Chepang or Tamang since the plants are ready to pluck anyway. her. “They give us only 200 or 300 rupees for a Kalikatar you can already see the green is regarded with suspicion. We pretended Dunai is history. Then came the As one farmer told us with a rueful smile: 10 kg sack,” she says. Farmers in Parsa get marijuana plantations on terraces across we were freelance marijuana traders, but Maoist strike at Kalikot. The Army was “The police do our work for us by cutting better prices: being so close to the border they the river on the other side of the valley. no one believed us. partially deployed in 16 districts, but the ripe plants.” are in direct touch with buyers and boast they Growing ganja here is as good as legal. In every Village Development the palace and the cabinet are playing Another farmer is a Nepali Congress can make as much as IRs 2000 (Rs 3,200) for There is no sign of any police presence Committee we visited there are ripening ping-pong with the proposed worker who grows ganja. He told us the a kg of ganja. since remote posts have all been closed terraces of ganja, vigilantly guarded by ordinance on an Armed Security police raids don’t really affect him much: villagers who know what it is worth. The Force. This week the government “The raids you read about in Kathmandu Ganja crop in a Makwanpur village that the police did not uproot out of pity for the family that grew it. links with Indian buyers goes back to the finally got its way on one point: the papers are all fake. And when there is a 1980s, and the villagers found it much paramilitary will not be governed by ganja haul, you can be sure they are more lucrative to sell this new cash crop the National Security Council. smugglers who didn’t pay off the right than to scour the surrounding forests for people.” One police source told us traders Himalayan herbs to sell in India. From the taking ganja to India pay police posts a fixed terraces carved out of the steep flanks of the Next week in Nepali Times rate of Rs 200 per sack, and there is no Mahabharat hills right down to the inner bargaining. A posse of 65 policemen went tarai villages adjoining the East-West on a showcase ganja raid last month, but it Highway, ganja plots are everywhere. In was clear much of this was being done as a adjoining Parsa District, nearly all the MILLENNIUM public relations exercise. Some villagers village development committees have GETAWAYS begged the police to spare them because sizeable marijuana plantations. they had nothing to eat, and it was obvious the policemen were just doing it for the Going to pot p6 CHANDRA KISHORE JHA ð Why AQUA? Only AQUA has: S REVERSE OSMOSIS, the worlds best known water purification technology. S HYPER OZONATION & OZONATION the only chemical-free process to sterilise jars and water. S Computerized nine-stage jar washing and sanitising system Aqua Minerials Nepal Private Limited Tel: 430149, 430454, 268555 FOR YOUR HEALTH ......... WE CARE 2EDITORIAL 15 - 21 DECEMBER 2000 NEPALI TIMES EXTRAORDINARY NEPALIS In media schools, they teach you that news is whatever is out of the ordinary. This is the woman-bites-bitch rule of journalism. When positive becomes commonplace, it is negative that makes the news. Thousands of buses travel safely to their destinations every day. That does not make news. It is the bus that falls into the Trisuli that is reported. Having said that, buses are now falling so frequently into the Trisuli that it takes a threshold fatality of at least three passengers before it is even reported by the national news agency. Usually, it needs at least ten dead to be broadcast on Radio Nepal (unless some bigwig is on board), and 15 to make it to the evening television news. Like a tree that topples in the middle of a forest, unless there is someone there to witness the event, it hasn’t happened. It is the same with the Maoist body count. When a schoolteacher is hacked to death in Gorkha, or a VDC chairman is shot in Baglung while jogging, it is for the inside pages. A day after we wrote an editorial on this subject earlier this month, eleven policemen were killed in Kalikot. It was a blip in the media radar screens, and faded away within a day. The surnames of those killed in Kalikot showed they represented castes and communities from Dhankuta to Dadeldhura—sons of poor Nepali families who joined the police because they needed jobs. Only one newspaper knelt to interview the widow of the constable from Dang, and chronicled the tragedy for a far-away family of one life lost.

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