Sukumbasi is not an illegality, but a history of being pushed out. People arrived in Kathmandu with what they had left. Some came when farms failed, soil eroded, and land was divided to the point of survival. Others came in search of better education, health care, and wages. The 10-year-long people’s war further emptied villages. Nearly a million people fled during the conflict, many drifting toward Kathmandu, where anonymity felt safer than home.

The capital city grew fast, too fast to plan and too fast to include these displaced ones. The land in Kathmandu turned into plots, and plots into profit. Prices soared, and rent followed. The poor were priced out of the very city they helped build by working as daily wage earners; carrying bricks, cleaning homes and streets, hauling goods, and driving; stitching the economy together invisibly. 

Without land titles, without savings, without caste privilege, many, especially the Dalit communities, found no door opened to them. Forcing them to build their own on public land, along the Bagmati river, beside sewage and floodwater. Eventually, building a settlement, a community.

The state kept promising to these Sukumbasis, commissions came and went. Laws were written, rights were acknowledged, but rarely delivered.

For Sukumbasi, on paper, there was land for the landless, housing for the homeless, rehabilitation for the displaced, but in practice, little moved.

Over the decades, only a fraction received land. The rest remained registered, surveyed, categorized, and on a lifelong waiting list.  

An eviction of Sukumbasi has become the default answer. When the state acted, it often arrived with bulldozers and no solution to their homelessness. From the early 2000s to 2012, from 2022 to now, settlements were cleared in the name of security, development, or beauty. Homes have disappeared in hours, and people have stayed displaced for years.

A housing project called “Ichangu Narayan Housing Project” was once built for Squatters and the Urban Poor, a government-owned housing project of NRP 230 million that would provide homes to squatters at low-interest loans. But the housing was far from the city, small, and unaffordable, as one unit measuring 200 square feet each was priced at Rs 1.2 million (Rs 12 lakhs). No one moved in. Not because people refused change, but the solution ignored how they lived and worked.

The lesson was simple: one cannot relocate a life by relocating a structure.

The debate circles endlessly about who is a Sukumbasi and who is not. Landlessness in Nepal is vast, with millions without secured rights. Caste, displacement, broken reforms, and economic exclusion have shaped for decades who end up by the river.

Some so-called Hukumbasi have certainly exploited the systems, but many have not. 

What is being removed is more than a settlement. It’s a fragile home of Sukumbasi of tin sheets, tarpaulin, and salvaged wood. Not just home but what’s broken inside it are the routines of children going to school, jobs within walking distance, neighbours who double as safety nets. Hence, a sudden eviction of these Sukumbasi is not just erasing a structure, but breaking proximity to work, to water, to community.

Clearing riverbanks may clean the city’s surface, but it doesn’t resolve what lies beneath, which is unequal development and failed redistribution. A Sukumbasi is not defined by the occupation of land but rather by the absence of one. Therefore, calling someone a Sukumbasi might make it sound like a category, but it is, in fact, a consequence of neglect of history and policy.

Major Squatter Eviction Sites in Kathmandu (April 2026 Drive)

1. Thapathali (Bagmati riverbank)

This is the only site with clearly reported figures so far, and it was among the first major demolition zones. (777 huts demolished, 1600 people displaced)

2. Bansighat (Teku / Bishnumati corridor)

3. Balkhu (Bagmati corridor)

4. Shankhamul

5. Manohara River area (including Gairigaun / eastern corridor)

6. Sinamangal (riverbank settlements)

7. Balaju (Bishnumati corridor)

8. Kirtipur (riverbank settlement pockets)