This is the first story in a three-part miniseries on Nepal’s development plans around protected areas. Read Part Two and Part Three.
by Abhaya Raj Joshi on 29 March 2024
- Nepal’s Ministry of Forest and Environment is working new regulations to permit hotels to operate within national parks like Chitwan, a draft of the document seen by Mongabay suggests.
- The decision follows the closure of seven hotels in Chitwan National Park in 2009 due to ecological concerns and alleged involvement in poaching, with the last of them shutting down in 2012.
- Despite opposition from conservationists and local communities, the government has shown interest in allowing commercial activities, including large-scale hydropower plants, within national parks, raising concerns about environmental degradation.
KATHMANDU — Nepal’s Ministry of Forest and Environment is preparing fresh regulations to allow hotels to return to national parks such as Chitwan, a decade after they were shut down based on environmental concerns.
Although rumors were doing the rounds in the corridors of the ministry and the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation in Kathmandu for a long time, with officials neither confirming nor denying the preparation, Ministry Secretary Deepak Kumar Kharal and department chief Sindhu Dhungana spilled the beans at a program organized by the World Bank in Kathmandu recently.
Kharal, addressing the program, said the government is working on a new regulation that will “open up an avenue” for private sector investment in Nepal conservation. Dhungana went a step further to say the new regulation will address policy barriers to allow the private sector, which has so far “shied away” from investing in projects inside protected areas, to do so.
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