Kathmandu Valley´s booming economy has attracted plains labour by the tens of thousand. Kathmandu residents do not need reminding that there is an open border between India and Nepal. They see evidence of it every day in the large number of Indian labourers and small-time merchants who are to be found in all corners of the city, seeking their fortune.

How many citizens of Nepal are presently working as migrant labourers in India, and how many Indians are working in Nepal? The world of scholarship on this sensitive geopolitical question is not much help with answers. There has been too much loose talk and not enough dedicated research on the subject. There is, therefore, enough reason to treat with caution any number that is proferred as to the population of migrant labour on either side of the border.

You would not know it seeing lone Nepalis at work on the streets all over India, but there are a number of groups intent upon organising them and providing them a level of protection. Almost all these groups are politicised, however, with links to parties and factions back in Nepal.

"The fact that Nepalis are by nature straightforward has been proved false." On the night of 13 January 1996, 48-year-old executive Satya Prakash Sharma, his 42-year-old wife Shobhana, daughter Charu (20), son Puneet (15) and their nine-year-old domestic help, Dinesh, were bludgeoned to death in their flat in the upper middle class locality of Vasant Kunj in South Delhi. Even by the gory standards of the Indian capital, this one shocked the city.

It does not seem to shame nor needlessly bother Kathmandu´s ruling classes that highland peasants by the hundreds of thousands leave the country every year to work the most wretched jobs in the plains of India.

Here is the official text of an actual speech given at a recent session of the United Nations General Assembly by a South Asian delegate whose identity and nationality shall remain anonymous to protect the person from parcel bomb attacks:

SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT By mixing with their host cultures, the Non-Resident South Asians of Southeast Asia would be protecting their own long-term interests, as well as helping bring forth a new culture.

SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT Many Malaysian Indians may feel marginalised, but there is nowhere else they would rather live. Especially not the Subcontinent of their ancestors.

SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT Australia is regarded as a country of "milk and honey" by South Asians, and a large contingent of qualified Indians, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Afghans and Nepalis have migrated over in the last two decades since the "White Australia" policy was abandoned in 1972. There are today 125,000 South Asian Australians.

The rickshaw of Bangladesh, poorly designed and manned by the underclass, plays an important role in propping up the national economy. Its neglect by government officials and researchers can only hurt the country´s own interests.

A clean, green, healthy Dhaka will happen with regulation of the internal combustion engine, not by condemning pedal-power.

Unwelcome millennium The population of South Asia has no connection with the Gregorian calendar except in the most recent nano-second of recorded history.

16,000 and Counting... A fact sheet on the status of victims of the Bhopal Gas Disaster of December 1996 reminds one of the continuing horror of that singular event. The information circular, put out by the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udhyog Sanghatan and Bhopal Group for Information and Action, provides an account of the long-lasting effects of the industrial disaster when over 40 tonnes of deadly Methyl Isocyanate, Hydrogen Cyanide and other gases leaked from "a hazardously designed and recklessly managed" pesticide factory of the multinational Union Carbide.

Who ´won´ and who ´lost´ in December´s Indo-Bangla agreement on sharing the waters of the Ganga? The answer is hard to find in the complicated calculations that appear to have gone into the treaty. However, we will know soon enough, as the driest months up ahead reduce the river´s flow at Farakka´s sluices.

In every case, selfstyled prophets of change in Pakistan have failed to deliver on their promises.    

The Indian Administrative Service remains an imperial institution which has failed to endear itself to the people. It is not indispensable.  

A spoof on "CIA Operations in the Himalayas", taking off on real Central Intelligence Agency activities in Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s using Nepal as a base of operations. This was picked up from discussion site on the Internet  Transcripts of messages between the agent and CIA headquarters in Washington have only recently been declassified. Some initial excerpts follow:

A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu by David Tomory Harper Collins, London, 1996 pp 237, GBP 4.95 ISBN 1 85538 444 2

My South Block Years: Memoirs of a Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit UBS Publishers and Distributors, Delhi, 1996 INR 395, ISBN 81 7476 132 2

When Harish Kapadia´s businessmen friends think he is attending a dealers´ conference in Kanpur, he may well be melting ice for tea on a pass up at 18,000 feet in Kashmir.

The new Indo-Nepal trade treaty signed on 4 December 1996 will allow, for the first time, goods manufactured in Nepal access to the Indian market free of custom duties. The treaty does not include cigarettes, alcohol, perfumes and cosmetics, but pretty much everything else. The benefits that can accrue to Nepal is therefore immense.