Can Nepal women ‘untouchables’ outlive tired caste systems?

The obvious answer is to provide free and easily available education to all parts of Nepal.

Public school in Nepal is not free. Parents are required to pay fees for school supplies, class registrations and extra programs. This expense leaves most poor Dalit families out of the curve, unable to send their children to school. Where money might be made available to pay an oldest son’s way, a daughter is often told she must stay home.

In 1996, Bishnu Maya Pariyar, a Dalit woman from the Gorkha Province of Western Nepal, decided to do something to help. “I never got an opportunity to get to a higher level,” said Pariyar. “People in the West don’t know how terrible the caste system is in Nepal.”

From the age of ten she had dreamed of a better life. She collected rice and millet left in the fields after harvest to help pay for an early education her father couldn’t afford. Later after many struggles, Pariyar started a program based on the microfinance concepts of Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen Foundation, in an effort to help Dalit women educate themselves and their children.

“Women are learning to read and write. They are learning sexual and reproductive health. They are learning that they are not worthless and that they are human beings worthy of living,” said Bishnu recently in an interview for ODE magazine.

By combining seed money from two American women, Paniyar formed a small micro-financed group of women known today as EDWON – Empower Dalit Women of Nepal. EDWON encouraged women to meet, even against their husbands’ wishes, six days a week, two hours a day, over a six month period to learn banking, family and business management and literacy. Soon other groups began. Each group developed their own banking fund and hired a literacy teacher to teach them, as they pooled their money to buy pens, pencils and paper.

A few years later, in 1999, an American photographer, Eva Kasell, found out about Bishnu’s program and offered to sponsor her to attend college inside the US. Pariyar went on to receive a graduate degree from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2006. Today her ideas to empower Dalit women have helped set in motion more than 700 secondary school scholarships for Dalit children and has helped over 1500 Dalit women.

“At the moment, (public) education in Nepal for children is only grades one to five,” said VSO Education Advisor, Peter Reid. “They plan from 2009 that it should be grades one to eight. The demands on funding for that will be huge – at the moment, 30 per cent of the education budget is provided by donors.” Donors include the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank along with nation donors like Norway, Finland, Denmark and the Department for International Development UK.

But the question is: How much of this money will help Dalit children? And will the larger Nepali society allow Dalit children to fully participate?

Climbing a Long Political Ladder

The new Nepali constitution, which now reserves a mandatory 33% seats on the national parliament for women, had a recent victory when it elected 250 women in April 2008 to the new 601-member Constituent Assembly. Of these, 2.8% made up seven elected Dalit women. This proves the tide of acceptance for Dalits in Nepal can happen, but society still has a long way to go to integrate caste struggles and issues.

“Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and all kinds of related intolerance have not gone away,” said former UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson with Nelson Mandela during the 2001 UN-WCAR conference. “We recognize that they persist in the new century and that their persistence is rooted in fear: fear of what is different, fear of the other, fear of the loss of personal security.”

‘Untouchability’ is now a legal punishable crime in Nepal. But it continues on a large scale unenforced as an everyday social happening.

As human beings, can we think what it must be like to force a woman to eat her own excreta? It goes without saying. Mary Robinson and Nelson Mandela may have it right, “While we recognize that human fear is in itself ineradicable, we maintain that its consequences are not ineradicable.”

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A Dalit woman named Parbati who has been displaced by violence against Dalits in her home region now resides in Baglung, Nepal, but she suffers still, due to extreme discrimination. This 3:05 minute 2009 video is an Advocacy Project production.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS TOPIC GO TO -

-       Asian Human Rights Commission – Urgent Appeals  Nepal
-       UNESCO – Forms of Social Discrimination in Nepal, June 2006
-       EDWON – Empower Dalit Women of Nepal
-       Photojournalism Essays Nepal – Mikel Dunham, 2009

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Women News Network Nepal Correspondent, Punita Rimal, is a freelance journalist who specializes in covering women’s advocacy news for the Asia-Pacific Nepal region. She is a member of Nepal women’s media group, SANCHARIKA.

2007 Pushcart Prize Nominee, Lys Anzia, has also contributed to this story. Lys is a humanitarian journalist and Editor-At-Large for WNN. Her work focuses exclusively on current worldwide conditions for global women.

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Sources for this article include IRIN Asia, UNIFEM, UNESCO Office in Kathmandu, APACHA – Asian People’s Alliance for Combating HIV&AIDS, VSO UK – Voluntary Service Overseas, New York University Office of Public Affairs, NEED magazine, EDWON.org – Empower Dalit Women of Nepal, The Advocacy Project, ODE magazine, Clark University, Photographer – Mikel Dunham  and the 2001 UN WCAR – World Conference Against Racism.

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©2012 Women News Network – WNN. No portion of this story may be reproduced without permissions from WNN – Women News Network.

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