Nepalese town takes historic step … backwards

BANDIPUR, Nepal — The congestion and pollution created by massive vehicular traffic james in urban areas around the world have prompted some cities to ban cars, trucks and buses altogether from parts of their downtown areas.

While such efforts are not uncommon in affluent Europe and America, they are harder to find in developing countries where the focus is first and foremost on economic growth.

But Bandipur, Nepal is an exception.

Five hours by bus from the capital of Kathmandu, Bandipur is trying to balance economic growth with the prevention of pollution and the preservation of heritage. Vehicles are barred from entering the town and people must walk to reach their final destinations.

Bandipur is a story of boom-bust-boom development. For hundreds of years, it was located along a trade route which connected India and Nepal. The location benefited the town’s large merchant and trader population.

But in 1973, the Prithvi Highway was built from Kathmandu to Pokhara, a city further west of Bandipur. While trucks and buses could now move about the country more quickly, Bandipur suffered because it was not on the new highway.

Krishna Kumar Pradhan has spent all 60 of his years in Bandipur and has been deeply involved in the community’s development and evolution. After the construction of the Prithvi highway,  Bandipur “was a ghost town” as many people migrated to other cities that were more economically viable, Pradhan said.

Eventually a road was built linking Bandipur to the Prithvi highway, and the town could foresee a recovery. With the arrival of the new, paved road, some townspeople wanted to convert the dirt road through Bandipur into “a proper road.” The Bandipur Eco-Cultural Tourism Project began to organize the paving of the road.

But not everyone wanted to take that step toward modernization.

Some people argued for banning cars from the center of the town,  a radical idea in that part of the world. Members of the Bandipur Social Development Committee, which was in charge of remodeling the town, had studied in universities in Europe and America, and had a keen sense of what cars would mean for a small town like Bandipur.  Other towns, like Thamel in Kathmandu, were coping with roads that are too small for the number of cars that pass by daily, causing congestion and a lot of pollution.

“Some businessmen wanted vehicles to enter the main town but people like me disagreed, said Pradhan. “We didn’t want pollution or noise or traffic jams.”

After many meetings, it was decided that the road would be built from slates that could be excavated from a nearby quarry.

By building roads from local slate as opposed to gravel, the local economy would be revitalized because the slates  would come from the surrounding areas, instead of importing raw materials for conventional gravel roads from neighboring countries like India. The slates also added a nice cultural touch because they blended in with Newari architecture used to build the houses in that area, which is a cultural heritage of the Newari, a large ethnic group in Nepal.

As to the debate about allowing vehicles into town, the businessmen initially won the debate and pressed the Bandipur Social Development Committee to allow vehicles into the city. However, the battle was not over.

As the slates were being laid out, Pradhan told the construction workers to leave the stone steps on the road at the entrance and exit of the town, thereby effectively removing any chance of vehicles coming into the town.

“We tricked them” Pradhan recalled with a smile. To make sure that the steps would remain in place, a member from the Maoists (an influential political party in Nepal and involved in a decade-long insurgency that ended in 2006) was put in the committee to give it more clout.

The steps remained, and since then no vehicles have entered the town. Moreover, in contrast to other places in Nepal touched by development, Bandipur is kept very clean.

Every year there is a sanitation festival. There is also a program where the youth of the city can volunteer to help clean the surrounding areas and in return for their services they get to spend time on a computer and improve their computer literacy skills.

Tony Jones, the owner of The Old Inn a hotel in Bandipur, nevertheless said that even though Bandipur is generally clean “people still don’t see the correlation between having a clean location and attracting more customers.”

Most people living in Bandipur, however, appear to be happy with the way the road controversy was resolved. “It’s good — we like the fact that it is quiet and there is no traffic or pollution,” said Santosh Shrestha, an employee at a local store.

There are trade-offs. “Sometimes getting vegetables from the end of the town is problematic, also when someone gets sick we have to carry them by stretcher to the ambulance,” said Sakuntala Kayastha.

On the flip side, people like Pradhan argue that the labor involved in carrying goods (and people) to and from the trucks parked at the end of town provides employment to the unskilled poor.

Today Bandipur attracts tourists who want to experience Nepal’s natural and architectural beauty while escaping the bustle of Kathmandu. Hotels in Bandipur have renovated rooms from the inside to give them more modern facilities but have left the Newari architecture on the outside intact which makes a tourist’s stay more authentic. “It is not difficult to exceed tourist expectations here and people come back to visit a lot,” Jones said.