BIKRAM RAI
ONE AT A TIME: Children wait for their turn at a health camp organised at Siddhi, Chitwan, on Monday. More than 360 children received free basic health checkups.
After weeks of delay about proportional representation candidates, the new debate is who should call the first meeting of the second Constituent Assembly. Parties can’t decide who among the President and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers has the right and after two writs for or against the two have been filed, the Supreme Court is also involved.
The failure to get politics on track has meant that impunity reigns supreme throughout the country. One year after migrant worker Sita Rai was robbed and raped by airport and immigration officials (page 4), her family is still going court to hoping that justice will not elude her. The Kathmandu District Court handed out a six-and-half year jail sentence for her rapist, but left two of the implicated free. She is now pressing charges for corruption against them but it may be another six months before the Special Court decides the case.
Families of Nepali workers and pilgrims who went missing in June 2013’s Uttarakhand floods still do not know whether their loved ones are dead or alive. Reports released by the Indian and Nepali government differ with accounts given by researchers and volunteers, and the locals of Far West Nepal, whose young leave in thousands for the Indian Himalaya, have all but given up hope.