Nepal court rules protected areas and forests off-limits for land distribution

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KATHMANDU — Nepal’s Supreme Court has ruled the government can’t give away land within national parks and forest areas to landless people, in a move environmental activists have hailed but also expressed caution over. The verdict came as Nepal’s prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who has publicly stated that conservation laws in the country obstruct development, pushes to change laws to distribute land to 1.35 million families classified as landless, squatters, or irregular settlers.

“There are numerous cases where people have been living in their ancestral land for generations, but still don’t have formal ownership,” said Nahendra Khadka, vice chair of the land commission, which was recently dissolved by the government.The issue of landlessness was a key grievance underlying the decade-long armed conflict led by Maoist rebels, who encouraged the resettlement of landless and squatter communities to forest areas and public lands across the country.

“Our position is that we need to provide formal ownership to people who are living on a piece of land for a long time, but don’t have formal ownership,” Khadka told Mongabay. “There are only a few households that need to be provided land in a new place.” Although the Supreme Court ruling prohibits the allocation of forest and protected area land, it says nothing about what to do in the case of people who have already encroached on this land. Paudel, the petitioner in the case, said this was a major drawback of the ruling.

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