Back to news
17 Aug 2017 | Blog

Connecting Pixels to People: A case Study of the Gandaki River Basin

Ishaan Kochhar & Amina Maharjan

1 min Read

70% Complete

Nepal is experiencing a massive out-migration of the youth and labour migration is becoming an important factor in securing an alternative livelihood. Census data of 2011 indicates that 13 of the 19 districts of the Gandaki Basin have an absentee population of over 10%. It is a well-known fact that agriculture and remittance are the two main pillars of the economy in Nepal contributing to over 60% of the GDC. There is attribution here of the current state of agriculture in Nepal, to the absentee population in the basin.

There is a common Nepalese saying: ‘Panch padhyo halo chhodyo, Das padhyo thalo’, which literally translates to: ‘Those educated up to Grade Five leave the plough and those educated up to Grade Ten leave the village’. In a country like Nepal, where agriculture is the backbone of the economy, it is the main livelihood source for more than 80% of the rural population. Agriculture is portrayed as the occupation of uneducated and unskilled people. Therefore, educated youth prefer to migrate in search of better employment opportunities. A worrisome phenomenon has been observed in recent years, especially in the mid hills, of fertile agriculture lands being abandoned. At the same time, rural-urban mobility is having serious implications for downstream areas. Whatever studies on human mobility exist in Nepal, they do not give a clear picture of its scale and also often fail to analyse ground realities. So, there is little scientific evidence to support this narrative. To make it evident, we have used a mix of macro-scale top-down approaches (using geospatial and remote sensing) and bottom-up qualitative methods (in-depth interviews, focus groups discussion and participatory research).

<<READ MORE>>

Stay current

Stay up to date on what’s happening around the HKH with our most recent publications and find out how you can help by subscribing to our mailing list.

Sign Up

Related Content

Continue exploring this topic

19 Feb 2016 Gender in Koshi
What do youth have to do with women’s participation?

An age old question that plagues our society is: where are the women? In my recent field visit to Sinduli, ...

10 Jun 2016 Cryosphere
AWS On Ice

One of the biggest unknowns in how glaciers will respond to climate change are the meteorological conditions and melt rates ...

26 Apr 2023 Cryosphere
Schoolchildren from the Himalayan valley of Langtang take in the changing world

Schoolchildren from the Himalayan valley of Langtang in north-central Nepal, 200 km north of Kathmandu, are acutely perceptive of the ...

29 Mar 2019 Blog
A bumpy ride to Paro

It is not often that one sees a series of lightning bolts across the runway followed by bone-chilling thunder while ...

22 May 2019 Blog
International Day for Biological Diversity 2019 “Our Biodiversity, Our Food, Our Health”

Freshwater fish and fishing communities of the Hindu Kush Himalaya: looking at an oft-neglected ecological and livelihood challenge It would not ...

8 Mar 2018 Gender in Koshi
Women and Fieldwork: Reclaiming public spaces and transgressing curfews

Women’s Day brings into focus women situated at various intersections of class, age, caste, race, education, culture, and geographical location. ...

2 Aug 2019 Cryosphere
Keeping track of our melting glaciers

I have been part of expeditions to the Khumbu Glacier in the Everest region since 2016. It is quite a ...