Could the government be buying time and hoping that, with the passage of time, people would forget about the incident altogether?

The government has formed yet another technical team to see if the culprit behind the Nirmala rape case can be identified. How this new team will work any differently from the previous committees is anybody’s guess, but let us still give it the benefit of the doubt that it will look at different options to obtain the best results. The new technical team, formed by the Ministry of Home Affairs, is led by DNA expert Jeevan Rijal, former executive director of the National Forensic Science Laboratory at Khumaltar. It will study the vaginal swab of 13-year-old Nirmala Pant of Kanchanpur district in far west Nepal, who was killed after being raped on July 26 last year. One thing that is different about the new team is that it does not include a police personnel as in the many past committees. It has 15 days to submit its findings.

Fourteen months have elapsed since Nirmala was found raped and murdered, with her body half submerged in a sugarcane field, near her home a day after the incident. It’s been a long anxious wait, especially for the parents of the deceased, but the government remains clueless about who did it despite the public pressure mounted on the authorities to speed up the investigation. The police seem to have tampered with the criminal evidence from the very beginning of the investigation process as if they were trying to shield the real culprits. In the course of the investigation over one year, more than 400 persons have been arrested and released. A mentally disturbed person was also framed. The DNA of 11 people was collected, but none matched Nirmala’s vaginal swab. Some have been tortured during questioning, while quite a few police officers have lost their jobs for botching up the investigation. Among them, Superintendent of Police Dilli Raj Bista was sacked from his post for negligence in the crime investigation and failure to bring the culprits to book.

Is it really beyond this country’s investigation capability and scope to pinpoint who were behind the rape and murder of Nirmala? Or is the government simply not serious about revealing who did it? Rijal is hopeful of identifying the perpetrators by using the DNA sample collected by the police, although the Central Police Forensic Science Laboratory of the Nepal Police had in its report said earlier that the DNA sample was ‘too small and highly degraded’, implying it would be difficult to track down the culprit. In the face of heavy criticism of the police from all quarters, the Central Investigation Bureau of Nepal Police had initiated the process to send Nirmala’s DNA sample to foreign laboratories. Unfortunately that has not happened so far. If the current team is unable to come up with anything new, then the government should waste no time to have foreign forensic experts study the vaginal swab in their laboratory. Perhaps the government is buying time and hoping that, with the passage of time, people will forget about the incident altogether as has happened with some highly sensational rape cases in the past. They remain a mystery to this day and are remembered only when another ghastly incident occurs.

Project guidelines

Two-and-a-half months after the federal fiscal budget was tabled in the Parliament, the government recently issued the Local Infrastructure Development Partnership Regulations-2019 to select development projects to be carried out in each of the constituencies. The regulations will govern the financing and execution of constituency infrastructure development projects, for which Rs 60 million has been allocated to each of them. The regulations have identified 14 areas of development programmes to be carried out in each constituency.

A six-member Programme Advisory Committee, comprising a directly-elected lawmaker, lawmaker elected under the PR, National Assembly member, chief and deputy chief of the District Coordination Committee and chairperson or mayor of a (rural) municipality as members will select projects that will be executed in a constituency. The rules prohibit selecting projects in collusion with the political parties by sidelining the broader interest of the people living there. The projects should be selected in a way that creates labour-intensive employment. The regulations will discourage lawmakers from doling out tax-payers’ money to party cadres or petty projects that do not serve the greater interest of the people.