Evictions Alone Will Not End Kathmandu’s Squatter Crisis

Kathmandu’s rivers have once again become political battlegrounds. Bulldozers reduce tin roofs to piles of twisted metal while families scramble to gather whatever belongings they can carry. While officials defend the demolition as necessary for environmental restoration and urban order, local activists condemn them as a brutal campaign of inhumane displacement.

The recent eviction drives targeting landless squatter settlements in Kathmandu and other parts of Nepal have reignited a debate that surfaces every few years. But the conversation remains trapped in a dangerously narrow frame. The issue is often reduced to a simple question: should illegal settlers be removed from public land? That framing misses the deeper reality.

The settlements along the Bagmati River and across urban Nepal are not isolated law-and-order problems. They are symptoms of a much larger structural failure involving housing inequality, weak land governance, speculative urbanization, unmanaged migration, and decades of political expediency. Treating the crisis purely as an enforcement issue may create dramatic headlines and visible political action. But history shows that evictions alone do not resolve informality. They simply relocate vulnerability and reproduce the same crisis elsewhere. Kathmandu’s landless squatters problem did not emerge overnight. It evolved gradually through the interaction of multiple failures that successive governments either ignored or politically exploited. Migration into Kathmandu Valley accelerated for years while affordable housing remained almost non-existent. Formal housing markets increasingly catered to speculative investment and middle- and upper-income groups. Public housing policy remained weak, urban planning failed to keep pace with population growth, and land administration systems remained fragmented and poorly monitored. In that vacuum, informal settlements became the only survival mechanism available for thousands of low-income families. That is the uncomfortable truth policymakers often avoid confronting.

When cities fail to provide affordable legal housing, informal housing expands naturally. When governments cannot effectively manage public land, informal occupation grows. When political actors repeatedly promise regularization during elections, informality gains political protection. The result is a self-sustaining cycle. This April’s eviction drive displaced at least 871 households from areas including Thapathali, Shantinagar, Gairigaun and Gothatar, while verification continued elsewhere in the Valley.

Authorities also acknowledged that not everyone categorized as “sukumbasi” fits the legal definition of landlessness. That distinction matters enormously. The term “sukumbasi” has gradually become politically and socially overloaded. It often groups together very different realities under a single label. Some of these households are genuinely landless and trapped in generational poverty. Others migrated for employment opportunities and settled informally because legal housing was unaffordable. Some possess land elsewhere but continue occupying public land due to economic incentives, documentation gaps or political connections.

A one-size-fits-all policy response cannot address such complexity. This is precisely why repeated demolition campaigns have failed to produce lasting solutions. Governments focus on the visible symptoms while ignoring the deeper structures driving them.

Clearing riverbanks may temporarily reduce encroachment. But demolitions do not lower urban housing costs. They do not reform broken land governance systems. They neither create affordable rental markets, nor address migration pressures. And they certainly do not weaken the political networks that often thrive around informality. In many cases, eviction merely shifts settlements from one location to another.

What makes the current debate even more troubling is the growing tendency to portray all settlers as either criminals or helpless victims. Both narratives oversimplify reality and prevent serious policy reform. Environmental restoration and river protection, no doubt, are essential. Encroachment along river corridors creates ecological and public safety risks that cannot be ignored. The state has a legitimate responsibility to reclaim public land and enforce urban planning rules.

But enforcement without rehabilitation is not reform. A government serious about solving the crisis must move beyond episodic bulldozer politics and address the structural roots of informality. That begins with credible land verification systems. Nepal already possesses the foundations for stronger digital land administration through the Land Administration Information System. Proper integration with biometric verification and national ID databases can help distinguish genuine landlessness from opportunistic claims.

However, verification alone is not enough. Nepal also needs an urban housing strategy that recognizes housing as economic infrastructure, not merely a welfare issue. Affordable housing must be integrated into city planning rather than pushed to distant peripheries disconnected from jobs and transportation. Relocation efforts that separate families from livelihoods simply reproduce poverty in new locations. Transparency is equally important. Public access to ward-level settlement data, land ownership records, and relocation plans could reduce political manipulation and improve accountability. At present, opacity is benefiting intermediaries and political actors far more than vulnerable residents.

Most importantly, policymakers must stop pretending that informal settlements are temporary abnormalities. Urban migration will continue, Kathmandu’s population pressures will intensify and land prices will keep rising. Without structural reforms, new informal settlements will continue emerging regardless of how many demolition drives are conducted. This is not merely a housing issue. It is a governance issue. The sukumbasi crisis reflects how Nepal’s urban systems function, who benefits from institutional weakness, and who bears the cost of state failure.

If the government continues relying primarily on eviction campaigns for political visibility, the cycle will repeat indefinitely: settlement growth, public outrage, demolition, displacement, political bargaining, and renewed occupation. Kathmandu does not need another temporary cleanup operation disguised as long-term reform. It needs the political courage to confront the deeper systems producing urban informality in the first place.

(Parajuli and Oli are pursuing MBA from the Kings College, Kathmandu. This article is based on the systems-thinking research project they prepared while competing at the Map the System 2026, University of Oxford.)

(This opinion article was originally published in June 2026 issue of New Business Age magazine.)