Before 6 a.m. on April 25, 2026, the long-standing tension between Kathmandu’s urban development goals and the survival of its most vulnerable residents reached a breaking point. On a regular morning on the Bagmati riverbanks, bulldozers were rolled out on the squatter settlements forcefully, surrounded by Nepal Police, the Armed Police Force, and metropolitan police officers.
These are not singular occurrences of distress but are a repeated pattern across Kathmandu’s riverside settlements for nearly a decade. The April 2026 eviction under the new government displaced over 15,000 people, demolished nearly 4,000 structures, and 19 settlements across Kathmandu Valley were cleared within weeks. To understand what is really happening, we need to take a look at Nepal’s long history of people moving within the country, the condition of urban inequalities, the collision between environmental goals and the constitutional right to housing, and, most importantly, the mental and physical suffering faced by thousands of families living in temporary shelters with no clear path ahead.
Who is Sukumbasi?
The term Sukumbasi refers to people who live on land or in buildings without a valid land ownership certificate. Historical contexts from Ask Me About Nepal highlight that these settlements are not self-chosen identities but rather a product of decades-long internal migration. Driven by rural poverty, in search of better education, jobs, and opportunities, or escaping the ten-year-long Maoist civil war and the 2015 earthquake, many people moved to Kathmandu. But as the capital city grew rapidly and land prices rose, low-income workers who helped build and support the city themselves could barely afford a place to live.
The numbers reveal how quickly informal settlements grew in Kathmandu. From around 2,000 squatters in 1985, the population rose to tens of thousands by the early 2000s. A 2022 government report counted 3,466 households living along riverbanks across the Kathmandu Valley. But not everyone labeled as Sukumbasi is legally recognized as landless. Under Nepal’s 1964 Land Act, only those whose families have never owned land qualify as true Sukumbasi. This applies to only about 20 percent of riverbank settlers. The remaining 80 percent may own small plots elsewhere but still have no practical place to live.
The Legal Framework
Being Strained The Constitution of Nepal (2015) explicitly guarantees the right to housing as a fundamental right under Article 27. The Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling had established conditional authorization for riverside evictions, but conditioned it on the government first verifying the genuine landless families and providing them proper housing and direct financial assistance before any demolitions.
In a writ petition filed in 2023, a joint bench of the Patan High Court ordered Kathmandu Metropolitan City and 13 other respondents to identify and verify squatters within six months. However, this order had still not been implemented three years later.
On May 8, 2026, the Supreme Court issued an interim order instructing the government not to evict or relocate squatters and informal settlers without following due legal procedures. The order was issued by a division bench of Justices Kumar Regmi and Nityananda Pandey in response to a writ petition filed on April 24. By the time the court issued this order, the largest and most densely populated settlements had already been demolished.
Despite the government holding a near two-thirds majority in Parliament, it has attempted to push major reforms through ordinances rather than through normal democratic processes. The squatter eviction campaign has proceeded without serious legal concerns. As the international affairs magazine The Diplomat observed in a harsh irony of representative democracy, many people applauded a popularly elected government even as it destroyed the homes of some of the country’s most deprived and marginalized citizens.
Families Locked in Uncertainty
Besides the legal and political debates, there lies a deeper human crisis as thousands of families are now dispersed across government holding centres, training institute dormitories, hotels in Balaju, and a Red Cross facility in Banepa, Kavrepalanchok, some 75 kilometers from Kathmandu.
For many displaced families, the eviction was not just about losing a roof over their head. Many have lost their jobs as they can no longer live close to work or commute easily, whereas some have to commute 3 to 4 hours daily just to keep a job. Children have faced severe disruption in education and security, in some cases leading to missing important examinations and classes. Families searching for rented rooms often face discrimination and cannot afford rising rents. Those who had spent years saving to build even modest homes have seen everything destroyed overnight. Elderly residents, single mothers, and children are now living in uncertainty, with no clear idea of where they will go next or how they will rebuild their lives.
The Rationale: Why Authorities Target the Corridors
From an urban planning and environmental perspective, the arguments for clearing these settlements are grounded in urgent necessity. Kathmandu’s river systems are the city's core elements, yet decades of intrusion have turned them into narrow, polluted channels.
- Environmental Restoration: The "Clean Bagmati" campaign aims to restore the river’s ecological health. Intrusions prevent the natural flow of water and act as primary sources of untreated waste.
- Mitigating Flood Risk: Climate change has intensified the monsoon cycle. These low-lying settlements are essentially "death traps" during heavy rains. Clearing the floodplains is argued as a move to prevent future loss of life.
- Infrastructure and Mobility: The government requires these lands for the completion of "corridor roads." These systems are designed to bypass the city’s congested main roads, a project vital for Kathmandu’s economic efficiency.
Government's Actions
In response to the growing pressure on May 14, 2026, the government announced to provide Rs 15,000 monthly to the displaced families to help cover the rent until the verification process is completed and land ownership certificates are issued to those who qualify as genuine squatters. It also claims that families in temporary shelters are being provided with food, health services, and psychological counselling. In addition, the government says school buses have been arranged to ensure children from squatter families can continue their education in holding centers, and that proper nutrition has been provided for pregnant and lactating mothers. Authorities also state that priority is being given to identifying genuine squatters and planning their permanent resettlement. At the same time, a parliamentary committee has decided to carry out an on-site inspection to verify the government’s claims and assess the actual progress of the work.
Why Previous Solutions Have Failed?
The Sukumbasi crisis did not start in April 2026, and it will not be solved just by giving cash support. Since the 1990s, Nepal has created many commissions to address landlessness, but little has changed. All major political parties have promised land and resettlement to squatters during elections, but these promises were mostly ignored once they came into power. Over time, squatter communities have often been used for political support and protests without real long-term solutions.
Nepal is not alone in facing this crisis, and the outcomes elsewhere reveal clearly that the bulldozer approach does not work. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the government carried out large-scale forced evictions of riverside and urban poor communities throughout the 2000s and 2010s, relocating tens of thousands of families to sites 20 to 30 kilometers outside the city with little infrastructure and no access to employment. A decade later, studies found that displaced families had become significantly poorer than before eviction; many had abandoned the relocation sites entirely and returned to informal settlements elsewhere in the city. The evictions cleaned up the riverfront for real estate development but solved nothing for the people displaced.
The contrast with Thailand's Baan Mankong program, which stabilized over 90,000 households across 200 cities by upgrading settlements in place rather than demolishing them, suggests that the alternative to the bulldozer is not chaos but a different set of political choices.
The housing project called the Ichangu Narayan Housing Project, built for squatters and the urban poor, largely failed to achieve its goals because of its ignorance of the lifestyle of the people residing there. The government argues that squatter settlements are illegal and should be removed, but landlessness is not only a legal issue. It is also a social and economic problem that needs long-term solutions, not just eviction. In Nepal, land ownership is highly unequal, with a small wealthy group holding a large share of farmland, while marginalized groups own very little. More than 2 million people still do not have secure land rights. Because of this, removing settlements alone does not solve the deeper problem of inequality.
Conclusion
Still, the underlying crisis of the Sukumbasi remains unresolved. The aggressive demolitions of April 2026 proved that a government backed by a powerful legislative majority can easily eradicate physical structures, but it cannot remove the deep-seated socio-economic inequalities still relevant. By bypassing judicial warnings, utilizing emergency ordinances, and scattering thousands of vulnerable citizens across distant holding centers, the state did not solve an urban planning problem; it merely transformed a visible informal settlement into an invisible humanitarian crisis. Cash handouts of Rs 15,000 and temporary shelters are just mere temporary band-aids, imposed by decades of failed land commissions, unfulfilled political promises, and poorly conceived projects like Ichangu Narayan.
True development does not force a choice between environmental sustainability and human dignity; it demands both. Moving forward, the state must pivot from its "bulldozer-first" reflex toward an inclusive, tech-driven, and legally sound urban policy. Only when the right to housing is treated as an unbreakable constitutional guarantee rather than a dispensable luxury can Nepal break this tragic cycle and build a capital city that is truly equitable, resilient, and just for all its residents.
