Amidst largely despairing news on politics and governance, there is something to inspire optimism in the field of wild life conservation.

The Democracy Day that Nepal celebrates every year on Falgun 7 is becoming a ritual devoid of substance.

It’s deeply troubling that the government of K P Sharma Oli is displaying authoritarian tendencies through a number of steps it has taken since it took office in February last year.

Heritage site of Kamalpokhari in Thamel has become the representative case of how rich and powerful connive to get public land under their ownership.

Raj Narayan Pathak, one of the commissioners at Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA), who resigned on Friday, has defamed the country, and our anti-corruption watchdog, the institution people look up to for corruption control, in many ways.

The Oli government had generated a lot of hope and expectations and it had solid foundation. For one, Nepal had got the first two-thirds majority government after nearly three decades. Government instability, we were told, had become one of the hurdles to policy reforms and in expediting development works.

Reasons of landlessness in these representative cases might be different. But there is commonality. This problem arose mainly due to lack of clear government policy to resolve such issues when they arise.

Now Department of Foreign Employment has prohibited as many as 53 Malaysian companies from hiring Nepali workers due to their ‘dismal track record.’  Total of 67 companies—including four Qatari companies, and five companies each from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—have been blacklisted.

The relation between Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli and his Co-chairman of Nepal Communist Party (NCP) Pushpa Kamal Dahal is apparently fraught in the past few days.

The exact amount of the figure to be recovered from the telecommunication company and various other issues will be clear when the Supreme Court issues the full text on the verdict.