Eleventh Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference (2016)

Proceedings and paper abstracts of the Himalayan Policy Research Conference (Eleventh Annual) from the Nepal Study Center. Thursday, October 20, 2016, Madison Concourse Hotel and Governors' Club, Pre-conference Venue of the 45th South Asian Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

India has headed towards a significant political revolution, almost simultaneously with economic reforms, in the early nineties of the twentieth century. Relative rise of market vis-à- vis state and relative importance of local government vis-à-vis central and state governments may be viewed as extension of the same logic. The import of perpetual existence, ensured with passage of 73rd and 74th Constitution Amendment Acts, 1992 is yet to be fully realized in terms of complete devolution of functional and financial powers to the elected local bodies across the states in India. The present paper addresses the issues related to the functional and financial devolution and powers of urban local bodies in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. An attempt has been made to analyze why urban local bodies have become weak and are not able to perform effectively as vibrant democratic units of self-government. In order to attain this, the Constitution (Seventy Fourth Amendment) Act, 1992, has made it mandatory for the state governments to constitute Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). A new part, Part IX A, has been enshrined in the Constitution after Part IX of the Constitution. It deals with matters like definition, constitution of municipalities and ward committees, reservation, disqualifications, powers and responsibilities, powers to impose taxes, all relating to the urban local bodies. Article 243 Y stipulates that the Finance Commission constituted under Article 243 I shall review the financial position of the urban local bodies and make recommendations regarding distribution of resources between the State and the urban local bodies, determination of taxes, duties etc. grants-in-aid to urban local bodies, among other matters. To assess the performance of ULBs as enshrined in the principals of local selfgovernance, the paper examines the status of functional and financial devolution to ULBs in the state of Uttar Pradesh and to find out the perception and satisfaction level of the people about the quality of their service delivery. The analysis and results are based on official records, interviews with officials and elected representatives of the ULBs and a detailed field survey to assess the level of satisfaction of the people about the quality of service delivery of ULBs at various levels. Opinion of the public about various aspects of services has been collected on the scale of 1 to 10. The paper is based on a recent study undertaken by the author, sponsored by the Fourth State Finance Commission Uttar Pradesh, India. The results of the paper show that the local bodies have not been able to fulfil the expectations, which were aroused by the 74th Constitutional amendment. Some basic factors like, lake of own income sources, non-transfer of all mandatory functions, weak administrative system, un healthy relations between elected representatives and officials of ULBs and unsatisfactory service delivery have emerged as basic bottlenecks in the process of healthy functioning of ULBs. The major reason has been the lack of political commitment and unwillingness to devolve funds and functions to the local bodies on the part of the state government. This is sometimes justified on the ground that the local bodies do not have the capacity to discharge the functions. The correct approach would be to empower the local bodies in terms of functions, funds and functionaries. Simultaneously measures are required to build up the capacity of the local bodies so that they can handle all functions expected from them as mentioned in the Twelfth Schedule of the Constitution.

As in other places, in India dominant beliefs and ideals largely reflect the beliefs and experiences of the middle class. As such, social constructions like “respectable femininity and masculinity,” find their roots in professional, middle class perspectives and experiences. Likewise, these gender constructions help define and reinforce class. In the face of rapid globalization and increased educational opportunities for both women and men in India, it is important to consider students as actors in the construction of the new middle class as it interacts with definitions of respectable, or ideal, femininity and masculinity. Researchers have so far focused on those who directly feed or occupy middle class positions, as does Radhakrishnan’s work on IT professionals. I argue that it is no less important to look at the “aspiring” middle class – those who may or may not be able to reach global professional middle class positions, but whose aspirations and attitudes, their hopes and desires – even if they never actually reach them – give credibility to dominant middle class ideologies and hence a new definition of India as a nation. Thus far, studies of college students in India are largely concentrated on the urban middle class, leaving out a critical mass of non-urban college students who also contribute to the construction of gender and class, albeit perhaps differently than their urban counterparts. This paper examines the extent to which, and how, middle class college students in foothills of the Himalayas, conform to, and thus reinforce, beliefs about respectable femininity and masculinity and what this means for the making of the new middle class in India. This study draws from 197 questionnaires and 38 in-depth interviews administered to students who attend several well-regarded private and public universities in the Garhwali area of the northern Indian Himalayas to explore how gender and class ideologies express themselves, and are reproduced, in the aspirations and attitudes of students. Questions were asked with regard to students’ work aspirations, family expectations, and the relationship between gender ideologies and career and family aspirations. Although all interviews were conducted in English, I enlisted the help of Hindi-speaking research assistants in all locations in order to clarify and explain concepts and questions. Both male and female students in my study report aspirations and expectations that are, in important ways, aligned with the new kinds of respectable femininity and masculinity that are emerging in India. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the development of a new middle class in India. One important implication is that, by reinforcing dominant middle class ideologies, non-urban students in the Himalayan region play an important part in legitimizing middle-class interests, and hence what it means to be a modern Indian – even though they may never achieve middle-class status.

In this research project we examine the long-term economic effects of the recruitment of soldiers from Nepal into the Indian and British Army.

This study investigates the causal impact of work-related migration of parents on left behind children's education and investment on schooling. To isolate the direct impact of parental absence, we estimate the effects of parental migration and remittances separately. Using third round of Nepal Living Standard Survey and applying a two-step process to address selfselection into the migration statuses and correct for endogeneity into remittances, we find negative effect of parental absence and positive effect of remittances on education of children left behind. To further explore the heterogeneous impact of parental migration, we extend our analysis allowing the heterogeneity by educational status of mother. We find that the children of educated mother bear relatively less burden from parental migration. Furthermore, we find some evidence for heterogeneous effects of parental migration by child's gender and age.

The exodus of the Lhotshampas of ethnic Nepali descent from Bhutan since the 1990s is another case of forced migration in South Asia. After 17 years in refugee camps in Nepal and failed negotiations by the United Nation High Commissioner of Refugees to repatriate the refugees back to Bhutan, third country resettlement became the only solution. Since 2008, 100,000 refugees have been resettled in the United States, Australia, Canada, U.K. and the Netherlands, with over 86,000 in the United States. This paper seeks to examine the implications of South Asia’s geopolitics on the creation and management of this refugee crisis which generated a lot of international attention and concern. The issues at stake were the legality of Bhutan’s citizenship policies and the labeling of its bona fide citizens as illegal migrants, refusing repatriation and negotiation for a solution. This also raised the question of the refusal of India to offer asylum to the refugees when they entered India during their initial flight and failure to offer or even find a durable solution to the crisis. The third issue was the deliberate policy of Nepal at ‘warehousing’ the refugees and finally refusing local integration and insisting on repatriation as the only solution. While assessing the Bhutanese Refugee Crisis one cannot ignore the historic treaty relations of mutual cooperation, understanding and friendship between India, Bhutan and Nepal and the political and economic relations involved. This led to overtly magnifying a crisis that could have been resolved regionally and amicably. Were the Bhutanese refugees victims of South Asia’s geopolitics? The Bhutanese refugee crisis was the failure of South Asian countries to amicably resolve a domestic crisis leading to a gross human rights violation and adding to the refugee crisis of the 21st century.

Joining the "human rights comics" (Hong) genre popularized by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and including Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Malik Sajad's graphic novel Munnu (2015) seeks to expose human rights violations in Kashmir to an international audience. This paper will closely consider how Munnu constructs its human rights claims on behalf of Kashmiris by recourse to the non-human. Attending particularly to Sajad's use of the humanoid hangul to figure the Kashmiri, and to the presence of (non-humanoid) dogs everywhere in the novel, this paper will ask: how does the non-human come to figure -- in surprisingly gendered ways -- the rights-worthiness of humans in an occupied territory? How does it reinscribe or contest the primacy of the human enshrined in human rights discourses? And how might an attention to non-human figures reconstruct studies of the occupation and claims to human rights in Kashmir?

Since 1989 in the Indian controlled Kashmir more than 10,000 men have been subjected to enforced disappeared in the counter-insurgency actions by the Indian army. Kashmiri women mainly Muslim mothers and wives have organized under the banner of Association of the Parents of the Disappeared (APDP) to search for their disappeared men. In this paper I trace how these APDP activists propagate and sustain their struggle and operate under the rubric of international human rights framework to make a case for their search.

This paper draws on ethnographic research as well as critical readings of the legal archive to show how state power is exercised and also contested in landmark cases of fake encounters, disappearance, and custodial killing.

This paper presents an application of Ricardian approach to assess the impact of climate change on farmland values in Nepal. The Ricardian approach is estimated using a panel fixed effects model. The results are tested with two models that account for spatial effects: a spatial lag model and a spatial error model. The findings reveal that Nepalese farmlands are sensitive to climate change. This result is consistent in both the spatial and non-spatial analysis. The inclusion of the spatial effects, however, produced significantly more conservative estimates of climate change impacts. Average temperature in the spring and summer season and the average rainfall in the spring, autumn and winter season had an impact on farmland values. In addition, the existences of non-linear relationships between climate change and farmland values were found in certain seasons. The results from marginal impacts suggested the optimal temperature to be between 23.88°C and 29.36°C, where the land values increased by Rs.849 per hectare, for every degree increase in temperature. Similarly, for the rainfall, it was found that 1mm increase in average rainfall resulted in an increase in farmland values by Rs.1385 per hectare.

Under income uncertainties, agricultural farmers might be influenced by government-sponsored programs that might lead to higher income opportunities by focusing on monoculture at the expense of crop diversification strategy. However, the latter strategy is likely to reduce production uncertainties for agricultural farmers and hence, ensuring sustainable agricultural development in the targeted area. A theoretical model is proposed to understand such possible economic trade-offs between high income-lower crop diversification and lower income-higher crop diversification outcomes resulting from government-sponsored programs and institutions.

India’s rapid economic growth is highly dependent on stable access to energy supplies. With increasing growth in the consumption of fossil fuels, India’s dependence on imports of oil and hydrocarbons in general would increase substantially in the future which is 37.5 percent of our total imports already, making India search for energy security. Foreign policy therefore has a critical role in ensuring energy security for India. Energy security has, as a result, become a vital factor in Indian foreign policy. However, despite India’s ongoing initiatives to secure its increasing energy requirements from all over globe through its policy of diversification, West Asia remains the main source of India’s imports providing more than 65 percent of our total imports thereby making energy an important factor in India-West Asia relationship. Since the end of the Cold War India’s policy towards West Asia has been governed more by economic and energy considerations and less by the political rhetoric of the past. This paper analyzes India’s interests, challenges, and actual energy security policies towards the region and also attempts to study how far India’s Quest for Energy Security drives India’s West Asia policy.

There are many assumptions held by policymakers and scholars about the potential for hydroelectricity in the Himalayas. The first assumption is that the Himalayan rivers of Bhutan, India, and Nepal are a vast untapped source of hydroelectricity. The second is that the benefits of realizing this potential will provide for a routine cross border trade in relatively clean and sustainable electricity. The third is that despite the perceived benefits there are longstanding barriers that have prevented large scale hydroelectric development. Oseni and Pollitt (2016) argue that it would be worth understanding what barriers stand in the way of expanding cross border trade in electricity in South Asia and how they can be overcome. There have been, however, numerous attempts to identify and analyze these barriers. This literature includes studies from the Asian Development Bank, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the World Bank as well as individual scholars. Most of these works focus on certain aspects of the issue but tend to overlook a few important points. This paper will focus on two and argue that firstly the potential for hydroelectricity in Himalayan rivers has been exaggerated and needs to be reconsidered. Secondly, the barriers to hydropower development are not, as often assumed, simply technical questions regarding engineering strategies, environmental impact assessments, regulatory reforms or project financing. Instead, the barriers are much greater. One barrier is the hydroelectric dam itself. The megadams required to sustain a cross border trade in electricity are highly problematic. Another barrier is the legacy of decades of failed hydrodiplomacy especially between India and Nepal.