Category - Opinion

I recently read Prabesh Khatiwada’s long feature story on Onlinekhabar titled ‘बाम माछाको रहस्यमय जीवन : नदीका पाहुना, समुद्रका सन्तान’ (The Mysterious Life of the Eel Fish: Guest of the River, Children of the Sea). The title immediately stirred vivid memories of my childhood. Well and nicely articulated by Mr. Prabesh Khatiwada ji. Reading this story felt like reading a deeply resonant piece written by Setopati’s Sudeep Shrestha.

This article gave me a wave of nostalgia that swept over my hometown. I had never previously gone deep into the biology of this fish. From his article, I came to know that this creature is born in the deep saltwaters of the Indian Ocean, traveling thousands of kilometers upstream into inland rivers, only to return back to the ocean decades later to spawn and die.

Reading it brought me straight back to the late 1990s and early 2000s in my home village of Urlabari, Morang.

Back then, I knew nothing about the Atlantic or the Bay of Bengal, nor did I realize that the mysterious, slender fish swimming in our local streams were oceanic travelers. To us kids, the muddy banks of Solti Khola and the surrounding wetlands were simply our playground.

मोरङको बेलबारी नगरपालिकास्थित बजारमा बिक्रीका लागि राखिएको बाममाछा । हेर्दा सर्प जस्तो देखिने बाममाछा यहाँ प्रति किलो रू एक हजारमा खरिदबिक्री हुने गरेको छ । तस्बिर : मणिराम दाहाल/ रासस

Chasing Kaichi Baam with a Balchi

During the monsoon, the landscape around Urlabari transformed. Swampy peatlands flooded, and the river system connecting Solti Khola to the Bakraha River came alive. Equipped with a simple Balchi—a curved hook baited with earthworms and tied to a string and rod—my friends, my brother, and I would head out for swimming and fishing.

Navigating those marshlands wasn’t without its thrills and fears. We treaded carefully, always terrified of encountering the Vyatlung. Vyatlung used to be a mysterious, leech-like swamp creature that lurked in the mud. But the ultimate reward was catching a Kaichi Baam—the slender, scissor-like variant of the eel that hid deep inside underwater burrows. On other days, we would also come across the Andha Baam embedded in the marsh.

“Navigating those marshlands was not without its thrills and fears. We treaded carefully, always terrified of encountering the Vyatlung lurking deep in the mud.”

Whenever I slipped home covered in mud, my mother would scold me for wandering off to the river. What she saw as a dangerous childhood habit was, for us, an irreplaceable thrill. Finding a small Baam in the flowing river was rare, which made every catch in those muddy rivulets feel like uncovering a hidden treasure.

A Symphony of Soil, Simsaag, and Eels

Looking back, those floodplains were the economic and ecological lifeblood of our village. Monsoon floods brought down rich topsoil from upstream, forming fertile floodplains and small rivulets along the riverbanks. In the fertile topsoil of those small rivulets, local farmers cultivated Simsaag (watercress). These Simsaag beds provided an alternative source of income for their families.

That soft, nutrient-rich mud under the Simsaag beds became the ideal sanctuary and home for young Baam Machha to feed, hide, and grow.

“It was a perfect ecological loop: the river brought the fertile soil, Simsaag was grown in that floodplain, and the muddy rivulets sheltered the oceanic guests.”

A view of a wetland area in Urlabari with muddy banks, natural vegetation, cultivated Simsaag beds. I took this photo during my graduate field study.

What Was Once a Haven Is Now Under Threat

As Khatiwada’s article reminds us, the Baam Machha is a guest in our rivers. But over the years, we have made our rivers hostile hosts.

Even during my childhood, destructive practices were beginning to creep in. I remember seeing people place chemicals and poisons near bridges and embankments to catch fish easily. In the decades since, wetland drainage, riverbed degradation, and water pollution have broken the natural connectivity between our local streams like Solti Khola and the larger ocean systems beyond.

When we destroy a swampy rivulet in my village, we lose much more than a local fishing spot. We are severing a link in a grand, global migration that has existed for millions of years. The wetlands and marshy lands where we used to fish are now filled with concrete houses.

An eel caught in local riverwaters, showing the Kaichi Baam.

Reclaiming the Memory, Protecting the Future

Reading about the biology of the Baam fish has transformed my childhood memories. This story turned my simple nostalgia into a deep appreciation for ecological connectedness. The tiny Kaichi Baam and Andha Baam I pulled from the mud near Solti Khola had navigated an extraordinary, heroic journey across oceans and river networks just to reach our village.

Our local wetlands in the Tarai are precious. If we want future generations in places like Urlabari to experience the wonder of these river guests, we must protect our peatlands, stop destructive fishing practices, and keep our rivers free-flowing.

The next time you see a Baam fish, remember: it carries the mystery of the deep sea right to our backyard.

A team led by researcher Narayan Koju of Pokhara University has shown, through genetic analysis, that Nepal’s pangolin is not the same species as the Chinese pangolin found in China and Southeast Asia.

It’s a distinct species now being called the Himalayan pangolin (Manis aurita), found across Nepal, Bhutan, northeastern India, and southern Tibet. The findings were published in Communications Biology, a journal from the Nature group. Read More

Most recently, the Ministry of Forests and Environment constituted a technical committee comprising representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Home Affairs to mitigate agricultural losses driven by monkeys. Prior to this, the National Concern and Coordination Committee—which includes members from the Federal Parliament and National Assembly—produced a comprehensive field study report detailing the state of human-wildlife conflict. The diagnostic conclusions across nearly all these studies are remarkably uniform: prioritizing both short-term and long-term socio-ecological impacts remains paramount.

During a recent House of Representatives session, lawmaker and former minister Mahabir Pun asserted that entirely eliminating monkey-related conflict is an insurmountable challenge. Claiming that historical countermeasures had universally collapsed, he noted that building a rocket is actually scientifically easier than finding a simple technology to chase away a monkey.

While the state has not been entirely devoid of attempts, vital questions persist: How should local municipalities be supported in resolving this crisis? Is the nation genuinely incapable, or are our institutional frameworks uniquely broken? These queries remain unanswered. In the mid-hill regions, the phenomenon of monkeys raiding maize crops is an ancestral grievance, tracing back generations. The fundamental disruption has always existed; the contemporary shift lies simply in the modern intensity and frequency of these occurrences.

Currently, our structural Achilles’ heel in primate management is a total deficit of institutional coordination. Merely capturing a troop of monkeys from one locality and abandoning them in another does not resolve the crisis. A few years ago, monkeys from the Jute Mills area in Biratnagar (the capital of Koshi Province) were rounded up and released into the Kanepokhari forest along the East-West Highway. Today, that exact highway stretch is terrorized by the relocated primate troops.

In attempting to resolve a localized issue, the authorities succeeded only in cultivating a new crisis elsewhere. This Morang exercise demonstrates that haphazard relocation merely shifts the geography of the problem rather than solving it. Relocation demands rigorous preliminary studies regarding carrying capacity, ecological baseline, and timing before execution.

Understanding the Primate Balance in Nepal

Nepal handles three distinct species of monkeys, each carrying a separate ecological status:

• The Rhesus Macaque: Noted as ‘Least Concern’ on the global red list, yet acts as the primary source of agricultural and urban friction.
• The Assamese Macaque: Categorized as ‘Near Threatened’ globally and strictly protected under federal environmental laws.
• The Hanuman Langur: Spans four distinct sub-species, balancing between standard ecosystem populations and local vulnerabilities.

The ubiquitously visible species causing the highest degree of friction is the Rhesus Macaque. Its disruptive footprint spans the country. While agrarian communities endure the severest economic setbacks, they are not the sole victims. Pilgrims and religious sites are equally affected. In the Kathmandu Valley’s historical temples and shrines, primate troops routinely snatch ritual offerings, devotional items, and personal belongings from hundreds of visitors daily.

The Root Causes of Escalation

We cannot address the symptom without diagnosing the trigger. The baseline vectors include:

• Systematic fragmentation and shrinking of native natural wildlife habitats.
• Encroachment of dynamic farming properties direct up to forest lines.
• The steady, unchecked drop in natural apex predators—specifically leopards—which traditionally balanced primate numbers naturally.
• The steady availability of high-calorie human waste and deliberate feeding patterns.

The principal driver drawing monkeys into human settlements is the availability of effortless sustenance. In many regions, this migration is fueled not by an absolute scarcity of forest food, but by the opportunistic preference for calorie-dense, cultivated crops that require minimal foraging energy. In semi-urban zones, the absence of standardized solid waste management provides an ongoing, abundant food source that supports artificial population bubbles.

Shifting to Site-Specific Solutions

The primary reason strategic measures collapse is that we treat all troops identically. Interventions require a clear geographical taxonomy. A dynamic farm raider operates under distinct natural logic compared to a religious site scavenger. Managing them requires three distinct operational avenues:

Tailoring interventions to these specific behavioral profiles yields authentic results. Strategic design can incorporate available acoustic technologies, co-existence frameworks, and structural habitat restoration. Crucially, inter-governmental synchronization across Federal, Provincial, and Local tiers is imperative. With a decentralized structure, clarity must be established regarding specific tasks down to the ward level. Additionally, real-time communication networks to track primate movement and report early crop damage are essential.

Actionable Frameworks: Tactical and Systemic

Sustainable management requires balancing immediate farm defense with clinical long-term stabilization tools.

Short-Term Farm Safeguards: Incorporating botanical defense strategies by cultivating highly non-preferred, pungent boundary crops—such as lemons, limes, turmeric, Sichuan pepper (Timur), or hot chilies. These alter the initial risk-to-reward ratio for scouting troops. Farms can also incorporate solar-powered electrical perimeter boundaries (adapted from elephant control measures) and deploy directional acoustic alerts replicating localized alpha distress warnings to split up moving troops.

Long-Term Population Management: For isolated, high-density environments like urban cultural shrines, strategic biological population limits offer the most humane solution. Targeted laparoscopic sterilization models—which proved effective under parallel ecological strains in Himachal Pradesh, India—work reliably alongside the use of immunocontraceptive options (like PZP).

The Dead Ends: Export Protocols and Culling

Public discourse frequently circles back to international export mechanisms for medical laboratories. In reality, this route is blocked by massive legal, ethical, and international diplomatic challenges. Historically, regional neighbors like India and Bangladesh handled massive primate export contracts. Between 1956 and 1978, India shipped approximately 120,000 rhesus macaques to western clinical centers. However, deep structural pushback on animal welfare rights forced a comprehensive, permanent ban in 1979. Re-activating these transport chains in the modern regulatory landscape remains completely out of reach.

Similarly, the option of state-sanctioned lethal control or “culling” hits a brick wall. A nation like Nepal, deeply anchored in cultural, spiritual, and Vedic structural history, cannot reconcilably evaluate the mass systematic extermination of a species deeply bound to holy and revered spiritual dynamics.

The Horizon of Coexistence

Ultimately, there is no absolute, hands-off scientific cure to erase human-macaque friction entirely. The strategic mindset must transform from ideas of total exclusion toward intelligent, landscape-led coexistence. By securing physical perimeters, standardizing local municipal waste streams, and deploying clean tracking networks directly down to individual village wards, communities can establish strong structural perimeters while successfully preserving the shared natural eco-system.

Translation of my original opinion column published in Kantipur Daily.

Link: https://ekantipur.com/opinion/2026/05/25/how-to-manage-human-ape-conflict-52-18.html