'Legal' Discrimination

DISCRIMINATION against women in the Nepalese society runs deep. Battling these discriminations presuppose that there are laws in place that ensure protection of women against discriminations. It is easy to imagine the long battle against gender discriminations when various legal provisions spread in different acts and rules and regulations themselves are discriminatory against women. The passage recently of what was popularly known as "women's property rights" bill and which was in fact an amendment to the Civil Code, gave only a partial cause for celebration for women as there are still 28 provisions in the Code that can be termed as discriminatory against women. This came out in a report drawn by a high-level committee to review the existing laws concerning discrimination against women. The committee was constituted last year to review the existing laws and acts discriminatory against women, draft an amendment bill encouraging equality, and present recommendations essential for women's empowerment.

The findings of the committee were quite revealing of the regards in which women are held by our legal regime. The Civil Code certainly contained the largest concentration of anti-women laws, which now mercifully stands at 28, a lot down from 69 different provisions that it held before. But the Code, the one receiving the ire of women activists campaigning for mainly parental property for years, is not the only place where such discriminatory laws can be found. The army act, the land act, the registration of births, deaths and personal incidents, the act defining Nepali law, the bonus act, the provident fund act, the income tax act and the children's act account for other 53 discriminatory provisions. That is still not all. An additional 36 various rules and regulations contain 85 provisions that are discriminatory from the gender perspective. Prime Minister Chand assured the amendment bill drafters that the government had begun all necessary measures towards correcting the legal provisions discriminatory against women. The government, indeed, would do well to take into consideration the recommendations that the report gives. Clearly, since the traditions and values are so skewed against women in many respects, affirmative actions are needed if protection and empowerment of women are to be achieved. Measures like increasing access of women to the criminal justice system, stopping girl trafficking and sexual exploitation and so on are essential to allow women to realise the full individual potentials to be partners in the development process. Doing away with 'legal' discriminations would be an important preliminary step.

Seek Remedial Measures

DUE to the fear of wild animals preying on their crops and cattle, the farmers of Madi, Chitwan district, as per a news item carried by this daily the other day, were unable to celebrate this year's Bada Dasain festival with their relatives. According to the same report, the farmers of Madi, apart from having to constantly live in fear of rhinos and other wild animals foraging out from the Royal Chitwan National Park and destroying their crops, they have yet to recover from the traumatic experience of seeing their farms being turned into sandy banks by the floods that took place earlier this year. The problems that the farmers of Madi are currently being forced to bear with, though definitely traumatic for them, are also preventable. Especially when the means and resources like knowledge, skills and technology are within easy reach of the concerned authorities.

Pertaining to the ever-present danger of wild animals coming out from wildlife preserves like the Royal Chitwan National Park and destroying the farmers' crops, the concerned authorities, by now, must have received umpteen complaints from farmers with their means of livelihood, the farms, abutting the wildlife preserves and parks. And, undoubtedly, also numerous reports and suggestions from wildlife conservationists and experts as to how to preserve the wild animals that are living in the wildlife parks and reserves for posterity while at the same time protect the valuable crops of the farmers with farms lying adjacent to such national parks. Since frequent encounters between the farmers anxious to protect their crops from wild animals' rampage and wild animals coming out of their preserves to forage in the farmers' fields could, sooner or later, lead to adverse ramifications for both these protagonists, the concerned authorities should spare no efforts to implement the reports' suggestions that are applicable to our local context so that both the protagonists' rightful wants and needs are fulfilled and addressed to. As for rivers periodically overflowing or breaching their banks to turn the farmers' lush fields into useless sandy banks or fields, by now the concerned authorities know that such a devastation is due to both natural or man-made causes, mostly the latter. However, even for this particular problem the river-induced disaster experts have come up with proven remedial measures. If river floods devastating farmers' fields are to be the incidents of the past, then the concerned authorities should seek and implement those measures.