While Kathmandu is preoccupied with the Maoist blockade, 100,000 children in Chitwan have not been able to go to school for the past two weeks due to Maoist threats.

The Maoists have ordered that all schools located in areas with paved roads shut down, and 250 of the 402 schools in the district have been forced to close. These include government schools as well as 10+2 teaching, campuses and vocational institutes. "This is such a big waste, but no one seems to care," says Prem Chhetri, a local principal.

The chairman of the Guardians' Society, Pushparaj Sharma, says that the government doesn't even seem to be aware of the calamity facing education in Chitwan, and the Maoists are deliberately targeting education. Chitwan has one of the highest literacy rates in Nepal after Kathmandu.

Maoist student chief for Chitwan, Ramchandra Adhikari, refuses to bear responsibility for the closure. "In China, schools were the vanguard of the revolution," he told a radio interviewer. Human rights oganisations have added their criticism of the Maoist actions, saying it violates children's basic right to education. "They never did care about anybody's rights," says Homnath Kandel, the Chitwan secretary of the human rights group, HURPES

. (Indra Dhoj Kshetri in Chitwan)