The right to dignified life guaranteed by the new constitution indisputably includes the right to have a roof over your head. But to build a home, you first need a piece of land. Yet tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Nepali citizens own no land. The Land Related Problems Resolution Commission, formed by the current government last October, is in the process of evaluating over a million applications for land. Any way you look at it, landlessness is a big—and growing—problem in Nepal. Yet, instead of looking to solve the problem, the political parties have time and again sought to use the issue to extract political benefits. This is the reason successive governments have formed their own commissions to look into the issue; the current one is the 16th such commission formed since the restoration of democracy in 1990. The malafide intent of the current Oli government is evident in the Ordinance to Amend Some Nepal Acts Related to Land that it is in the process of being tabled in Parliament for final approval. Among its other problematic provisions, first, the ordinance allows lands provided by the state for certain purposes to be sold as normal land if they exceed the new land ceiling.

Second, it also allows the government to settle landless Dalits and squatters on lands that are public, near water bodies, those prone to natural calamities, those inside national parks and reserves, the lands currently covered by trees as well as those by the roadsides. The first provision is clearly aimed at allowing the current owners of the Giri Bandhu Tea Estate in Jhapa—who have been linked financially with the current prime minister—to sell the land they were given by the state for tea-plantation. The tea estate owners want to sell the land by going against a Supreme Court ruling that bars transactions on lands allocated for special purposes. On the second provision, there are suspicions that it is aimed solely at creating new vote banks for the CPN-UML, the prime minister’s party, as it sees a steady erosion in the size of its old constituencies. This doubt is justified. Yes, all Nepali citizens must get to live decently, which includes having a fixed address to call home. But can fragile ecosystems be ravaged to do so, and at a time the country is starting to witness troubling signs of climate change? And is it right to settle the landless in places where their lives might be at risk?

The problem of landlessness is a complex issue that calls for consensus among at least the three major political parties and preferably all political parties represented in Parliament. If KP Sharma Oli or Sher Bahadur Deuba or Pushpa Kamal Dahal were really bothered about the plight of the landless, they would have looked to build upon the work of each other on the problem of landlessness. Instead, with each new government, the initiative to distribute land starts afresh. A long-term solution starts with our top politicians learning to see the issue of landlessness through a broad lens. This in turn entails a careful evaluation of the socio-economic condition of the landless people, their safety as well as the ecology. Otherwise, short-term measures taken to serve vested interests or with an eye on vote banks will create more problems than they will help solve.