Chure region
4 June, Kathmandu: President Dr Ram Baran Yadav has stressed for political stability for preservation of the Chure Hills, which continue to face grave threats from deforestation, excessive extraction of sand, stones and boulders as well as other human activities, today’s Republica reports.
Political stability always has a direct correlation with management and mismanagement of the Chure hills, Dr Yadav said.
“If you look at the period of four years of the first CA, politics was unstable; we saw the judiciary assuming the role of the executive in this very period,” the President said.
Dr Yadav said that political turbulence has always caused damages to natural resources. “For the first few years after the 1960 coup, the Panchayat system was strong but it started getting old by 1965. By 1980, when the referendum was held, the Panchayat was too old to control rampant deforestation. This was when devastation began in the Chure Hills,” said Dr Yadav.
According to senior environmentalist Tirtha Bahadur Shrestha, Nepal’s Chure Hills are made of soft material, sand, sediment, and boulders, uplifted relatively recently in geological time as part of the formation of the Himalayan mountains.
Because of their composition, the hills are much more sensitive to the loss of vegetation and other human activity, the impact of which can be felt downstream in the Nepal Tarai and down to India, Shrestha adds.
