Nepal Now: On the Move
We're talking with the people migrating from, to, and within this Himalayan country located between China and India. You'll hear from a wide range of Nepali men and women who have chosen to leave the country for better work or education opportunities. Their stories will help you understand what drives people — in Nepal and worldwide — to mortgage their property or borrow huge sums of money to go abroad, often leaving their loved ones behind.
Despite many predictions, migration from Nepal has not slowed in recent years, except briefly during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. About 1 million Nepalis leave every year to work at jobs outside the country. Tens of thousands go abroad to study. Far fewer return to Nepal to settle. The money ('remittances') that workers send home to their families accounts for 25% of the country's GDP, but migration impacts Nepal in many other ways. We'll be learning from migrants, experts and others about the many cultural, social, economic and political impacts of migration.
Your host is Marty Logan, a Canadian journalist who has lived in Nepal's capital Kathmandu off and on since 2005. Marty started the show in 2020 as Nepal Now.
Nepal Now: On the Move
Are there still reasons to be optimistic about Nepal?
Gyanu Adhikari is co-founder of The Record, the online news portal that published from 2014 to 2024. With 10 years’ experience running a media outlet that not only innovated in its content – offering long reads, history series, and podcasts, for example – but also experimented with funding—using a subscriber model—Gyanu has lots to share about media in Nepal.
But surprisingly, he was most eager to talk about the state of the country—and more optimistic than most people I speak to about the future of Nepal. This episode was first published in 2024. I’m re-posting an episode today for the first time, mainly because I’ll be out of town this week and couldn’t finish a new one fast enough. I chose to feature my chat with Gyanu because it’s one of the most popular I’ve published since 2020 and also because it’s evergreen, since it deals with the media and the future, two subjects that many of us never tire speculating about.
I reached out to Gyanu a couple of days ago to ask if he wanted to add anything to his thoughts three years later. He told me, quote, “I still believe we are on a good path provided we can keep the constitution and rule of law — a secular federal republic will take us far. To speed up the progress, Nepal should be inspired by China and Scandinavian countries’ green transition. Democratizing the energy industry, for example, with feed-in tariffs, and replacing dirty with clean energy in every domain. That’d allow us to leapfrog ahead instead of merely play catchup with developed countries. We are also still badly under-investing in human capital, including in the arts.”
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Music by audionautix.com.
Thank you to PEI in Bakhundole and Himal Media in Patan Dhoka for the use of their studios.
Nepal Now is produced and hosted by Marty Logan.
I think in 10, 15 years, Nepalese would be very pleasantly surprised how far along the country has come.
Marty:Hi everyone. Gyanu Adhikari is co-founder of The Record, the online news portal that published from 2014 to 2024. With 10 years' experience running a media outlet that not only innovated in its content offering long reads, history series and podcasts, for example but also experimented with funding, using a subscriber model, Gyanu has lots to share about media in Nepal. But surprisingly, he was most eager to talk about the state of the country, and more optimistic than most people I speak to about the future of Nepal. This episode was first published in 2022. I'm reposting an episode today for the first time, mainly because I'll be out of town this week and couldn't finish a new one fast enough. I chose to feature my chat with Gyanu because it's one of the most popular I've published since 2020 and also because it's evergreen, since it deals with the media and the future two subjects that many of us never tire speculating about. I reached out to Gyanu a couple of days ago to ask if he wanted to add anything to his thoughts two years later. He told me, I still believe we are on a good path. Provided we can keep the constitution and rule of law, a secular federal republic will take us far. To speed up the progress, nepal should be inspired by China and Scandinavian countries green transition, democratizing the energy industry, for example, with feedin tariffs and replacing dirty with clean energy in every domain. That would allow us to leapfrog ahead instead of merely play catch up with developed countries. We are also still badly under investing in human capital, including in the arts." Finally, today I want to give a shoutout to Prem Awasthi, who I met again this week. He's the show's only two time guest and the first paid supporter of Nepal Now. Prem is now based in Afghanistan and will be returning there soon, so I was lucky to meet him for a chat. If you would like to join Prem as a supporter of the show, it will cost as little as$3 a month. Click on the Support the Show link wherever you listen. Please listen now to my chat with Gyanu Adhikari. Gyanu Adhikari welcome to Nepal Now!
Gyanu:Thank you very much, Marty. I'm glad to be here.
Marty:So many of our listeners probably know you as a co-founder of The Record, the online newspaper that stopped publishing a few months ago, and we will be talking about The Record and journalism in Nepal more broadly a little later. But first, you told me when I reached out to you something very interesting and something that I don't hear very often. You wanted to talk about your optimism for the country. So please start and tell me why you are so positive about the country's future.
Gyanu:Yeah. This might not be the best time to be optimistic'cause a lot of things seem to be going wrong in the world. There's a war going on, markets everywhere are crashing, there's a big energy crisis going on, countries are going into default and all you hear is bad news. But, I have a little bit of contrary opinion, based on three things really. Well first, I think all these macro events that are causing pessimism are gonna go away in a short while. Second is that I think Nepal has three fantastic things going for it. And one is, it's, it's demographics, which is very young and, eager to work and get out of the country if possible, and go back and do things. And it's very hungry and curious about the world. Second is that we have a, democracy which is turning out to be a very exceptional political system, especially in Asia and Africa. If you look at the map actually, from between Turkey to South Korea I heard this from, Tom Bell, or I didn't hear him directly from him, but I heard him quoted on this that there is very few democracies in between and Nepal stands out and it's probably one of the best functioning democracies in that huge geographical span. And there was India, which, claims to be a biggest democracy, but, India is having a lot of problems. I guess like Taiwan is, another. But, my point is that Nepal is lucky to have, despite its flaws, a functioning democracy. So, that will give it the, Democratic premium or whatever. It will help the country in the medium and long term, a lot. And the third thing that makes me very optimistic about Nepal's future, especially economic future, is that as the world makes huge efforts to transition to clean energy, Nepal is very well poised to take advantage of the hydro boom that's finally happening in the country. And it's producing, its expanding its production capacity very very rapidly. And this year it started exporting electricity also. So that is gonna be a enormous, a really big source of foreign currency, is gonna be a competitive advantage over a lot of other countries that are gonna face rising energy costs, especially from fossil fuels. Nepal can also be a very attractive destination for a lot of investors around the world for being like a very clean-energy country. I think those three things are the biggest reason that I'm optimistic about where we are headed.
Marty:Yeah, those are all very positive. And one other thing that, surprisingly I think, actually seems to be, doing, maybe doing better than expected right now is the tourism rebound. It looks like very quickly people are starting to return to Nepal, more quickly than I think a lot of people forecast, because obviously we're still in the pandemic and then there are all these other things happening that you mentioned at the beginning. Just to get philosophical for a moment and maybe play the devil's advocate a little bit, I'm really happy that you are focusing on the positives because I think in general we just don't do that enough. And it's very easy to always point your finger at the bad things. But you need to be realist as well and we can't put our heads in the sand about these other issues such as people migrating to work overseas because there just aren't enough opportunities here at the moment. Given that, there are, as you said and rightly pointed out, those really important possibilities, but also the negative things, do you think it makes a difference how you approach it, how people perceive the country? Is it important that the leaders are positive about the country?
Gyanu:I think it makes a huge difference. It sets the mood for your next steps, right? And, the point about how bad things are, really it depends on whether it is gonna get worse or whether it's gonna get better, right? So I think although things are bad, they're not gonna get a lot worse from here. You could put it in another way things are so bad that they can only get better in some ways. So I think we have to look into the future and think about whether it's gonna get progressively worse from here or progressively better from here. And I, I think in terms of those three things I pointed out, like the enormous hydro boom and the demographics, which is very eager to move about and explore the world and raise their standards of living and education, all that stuff. I think those things will really catapult Nepal. In 2006, 2008, everybody was waiting for the kind of peace dividend in Nepal. The 20 years of political instability and 10 years of war and 10 more years of wrangling over constitution and big political battles I think that era is over. I think Nepal is right now at a cusp of reaping that piece dividend, and it is both its internal situation and externally too given the position of a very fast rising India will help the country as well. All the factors that are aligned, I think in 10 15 years, Nepalese would be very pleasantly surprised how far along the country has come. come
Okay. I certainly hope you're right. One of the things that I've repeated probably too often is that I think Nepal has done well in, in the last couple decades that you were just mentioning, despite the politicians, despite its leadership. Despite all of the hardship that the country went through, it has continued to grow and progress.
Gyanu:Look at the indicators: the year I was born, Nepalese lived on average for about, 42 years or so. Now, Nepalese live on average for 70 years. Within one generation, that's a leap forward. If you look at other development indicators, about the standards of living and quality of life, they're all improving. The world in general tends to get richer over time. But are we increase, improving faster enough is the question. And I think our pace of improvement is gonna pick up from now on. But also my take on the politicians is not the usual take in Katmandu, although I have the kind of benefit of being away from there, so I don't have to deal with the everyday, maybe that's why. But I think we should be really thankful for the current crop of politicians for getting us to a republic. Who would've imagined in my generation before 2000, 2005, that we would one day be a republic? It was unthinkable. And getting us to a federal system, which is, as I said, it's, starting from a very, very low point, but, and it can only get better. Politicians have done a lot of things that we are unhappy with. There's corruption, nepotism, Nepal seems to be going back on the inclusion agenda. There's a lot of things that they could do better, but I think the overall cynicism about the political leadership, I think is actually quite misplaced. More than any other generation of politicians, this crop has delivered quite a bit.
Marty:Okay, well.... I'm not sure. Certainly yes, those accomplishments are, great and I haven't studied this enough or just spent enough time talking to people about it. I wonder if the politicians were dragged kicking and screaming to those accomplishments. But this isn't going to be a political discussion. Tell me, just to switch gears a little bit, you mentioned that you are not inside the country right now, and maybe that gives you a bit of a different perspective, but I understand you're in the US are you doing something similar to what you were doing with The Record, or what are you up to these days?
Gyanu:So I moved to Washington DC just before the pandemic, September, 2019. I'm here with my wife who works at the World Bank and my two kids, and we moved here because of her job. And because she wanted to be closer to her sister, who also lives here. And, for the past few years, I have been a house husband, sort of. I didn't have a work permit to work here, and the pandemic forced us all inside. So we've been like hunkering down and I've been spending a lot of time with the kids.
Marty:Okay. that sounds good. In some ways people might complain that they're unable to work, but on the other hand, it's nice to have that time, especially as a guy generally you're expected to be the one working, or...
Gyanu:it's definitely not the gender norm. It's, surprising to, or at least like not common in Nepali societies, for the wife to be working and husband to be taking after the kids. But you know it's been very rewarding, I think, especially from in my generation and others, and in quarantine Nepal too, like the absent father is a very much a common phenomena, especially with with the men going abroad to work. So I feel very privileged to be able to do that actually. And, it's a lot of fun to explore the world with the kids too.
Marty:Yeah. And, DC's a great place to do it, for the museums, especially. Let's talk a little bit about journalism in Nepal. And I think some people would like to hear a little bit about The Record particularly, but we'll, we can broaden the discussion as well. I, went back and looked just before we started at the Facebook page for the website, and it describes The Record as fiercely independent and member supported. Obviously though the site stopped publishing in July. Does that mean that it's not possible to have a media in Nepal in English that is fiercely independent and member supported?
Gyanu:I think it's definitely possible. If anything, our experience in the past 10 years has taught us that, that is possible. The audience is there. The kind of big change from when we started and now and I say this, that if we had started now we would probably have been a lot more successful going forward than when we started. Again, Nepal has made enormous progress in the last 10 years or so. And one of the areas is let's say the digital payment system, right? When we started, it was very difficult to do a membership based model because the payment system just wasn't there. It's been past couple of years, probably accelerated by the pandemic, that Nepal has made this giant leap in terms of how payments are made. It's improved dramatically. With that in place and with perhaps expanding the reader base into Nepali and really going after the Nepali reading, Nepali speaking public, I think the membership model is, very much, very much possible and fierce, independent journalism in Nepal has always been there in nooks and corners and different individuals in different media houses have been fiercely independent. I, don't mean to imply that Record was only publication which was aiming to be that or was that, and the kind of the so-called mainstream media has a lot of people who are fiercely independent and produce fiercely independent journalism. And, we, have a lot of respect, for that as well.
Marty:In the message that you posted on the website, you and Kate Saunders, your co-founder, you said that you had many ideas for reviving The Record. Are you still exploring those or what's, the status? Is there a status?
Gyanu:So we are on a hiatus right now and we are trying to have maybe a year or so of a thinking time to see what other avenues might be there to revive it. But the thing is, it doesn't have to be Kate or I who revive it, right? We built it because we felt like the space needed that kind of publication. And I'm hoping that down the road there will be enthusiastic people from younger generation perhaps who want to experiment with it and do something with it and take it to a new direction, perhaps into audio, I dunno. We haven't really given up on the idea. We still believe that it's worth trying to create a media group that really values independent journalism and also values journalists and tries to take care of them much better than the current media houses. And that dream is still alive, it hasn't been killed yet. But we don't know when we'll be able to pick it up, honestly,'cause it's a very time consuming and resource consuming enterprise. And because we were not doing any advertisements or we didn't really have a large enough membership base to kinda keep the publication going, we had to pause.
Marty:And so is one of the more serious, if I can say, ideas to have it be bilingual and wouldn't that be really complicated?
Gyanu:Actually it's not. Being bilingual would actually, is probably a very smart thing to do if you want to really grow fast. If you're in Nepal the audience size and the number and reach is a altogether different scale if you're in Nepali versus English. You would need people who are very proficient in Nepali and the back end, the software and the tech expertise needed to run it would actually be an asset for Nepali too, because all you need to do is tweak a thing here and there, and you have the same software producing Nepali stories.
Marty:Well, that sounds still slightly positive. Sounds there's definitely potential there. When I think of The Record a lot of things come to mind. I was just doing it. There's the fact that new voices, I saw a lot of new voices in The Record. I saw longer form journalism. I saw topics highlighted that weren't in the other English media. For you, can you put your finger on one thing or maybe just one or two things that define The Record? Or is it all of those things and more?
Gyanu:In the beginning it was long form stories, that was the one thing long reads. I think we were the first publication to like regularly do long reads in English in Kathmandu. And later we were experimenting. We were experimenting with a lot of different formats and see which one were fun and useful and contributed to the public sphere. Like we experimented with a lot of things. The things that I'm in retrospect gave me joy the long reads are one. At hot political moments we did a lot of opinion type also. The data stories are another we did really a lot of data stories, around elections. And some documentaries we produced some short documentaries. They were also enormously satisfying, especially the one on Nijgard, which got a lot of attention as well. And explainers, the history series, which were very popular among especially our younger audiences. There's a lot of demand for the history, like non textbook history of Nepal, in Nepali public sphere, I think, because most of the textbook history is very centered around kings and palace politics and that kind of stuff. The history series that Amish did was also like very very well received. I don't have one particular format that I really would zero in on. We did some audio stories as well on history and some podcasts. The photo stories were also like great fun to produce. I'm biased, I like most of the stuff that's there!
Marty:Good answer. I see that there, there are still new, portals, like news portals coming up in English only. I'm not counting them, but there's another new one that came out. Obviously people are still eager to do it. You mentioned earlier that if you had started The Record now or more recently, you might have had a better shot of making it last longer. Do you think these people who are starting now are building on some of that technology that you mentioned? Will they have a better chance of making a go of it?
Gyanu:I don't know, because I don't really know how they're planning to be sustainable. We were like the 200 something online I think they're at about 2000 online sites registered with the press council now. It's really exploded'cause there's very low barriers to entry to be in that space. Most of them will probably not make it, but I think a lot of these enterprises, I don't know what their business models are and how they're planning to be sustainable. You might have connections that keep you going barely for several years based from those advertisements until you manage to grow and be a sizable presence that advertisers come to you. I hope Nepali aspiring media entrepreneurs really look into the membership model, which we tried. I don't think any people should give up on it, I think it's an excellent model that should be taken further and the current environment, where, as I said, the improvements in the payment system and just like the penetration of internet and smartphones and the kind of technological changes that have come in Nepal society make that a lot more achievable now. The advantage of the model, the membership model we tried, actually goes beyond money too. It really helps build a community around your publication. It improves the medium editorially also because once you're membership based, then your ears are directed towards what your core supporters, what your people who appreciate your publication enough that they're willing to voluntarily give you money. That's a big hurdle to climb. So editorially also, I think it helps the channel or publication become very, very sound and reader focused or audience focused.
Marty:Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Say a little bit about the journalists, because we don't talk about the journalists, I think, enough when we're talking about the media. I've been a journalist for a long time, in and out for the past couple decades, but I was a full-time journalist for quite a long time also, mainly in Canada but also in Asia. And one of the things that really struck me when I first came here in 2005 is how little journalists got paid. In Canada, if you were a journalist with a full-time job, that's all you needed. You could live your life and live a good life with that job I know it's changed now. But when I came here, I didn't know any journalist who was just doing one thing because they just didn't make enough money, and so they had to wear all these different hats. How does the journalist fit into the model that The Record was built on and your current thinking now about the people who actually produce the content.
Gyanu:it was certainly, a kind of a big motivation actually the way journalists were treated in Katmandu, that there was a big motivation for starting our company,'cause we thought if things worked out and if we are able to. grow the way we wanted and become a successful enterprise that we could take better care of the reporters, with all proper diligence on labour rights and... When we had the money we tried to set high standards in terms of how we paid our writers also. I think we always aimed to be slightly above the market rate'cause we thought the market rate was so bad. And you're right, it's very hard to be a journalist in Katmandu. That's why like we keep losing talent to NGOs and INGOs. Especially in English language, it's very hard to stay in the field and it's very unfortunate. In terms of journalists who passed through The Record, because we were never really an established entity, it was always running on ad hoc basis. We were always running outta money and like trying to do how to retain or let go people. One of the greatest pleasures in my life has been, getting to know all the people who passed through our doors, especially the journalists. Most of them were smarter than I am, and came with very excellent ideas about what to do and where to take the publication and what kind of stories to cover. And, that was a, source of great joy. It still is.
Marty:And, I really hope that The Record take two or something built on The Record's model and experience does spring up here in Nepal again. So listen, Gyanu, it was really great talking to you. Thanks for sharing your views. I'm glad to hear that you're spending some quality time with your family there in Washington.
Gyanu:Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Marty:Thanks again to Gyanu Adhikari for spending some time with me today. If you like this episode or if you didn't like it or just disagreed with my or Gyanu's opinions, let us know. Right now before this episode ends, take a minute, actually take a few seconds, to like, follow or favorite the show wherever you're listening, so you don't miss the next one. I'm Marty Logan, thanks for being with me. I'll talk to you again soon.
