The DAOs should comply with the ordinance so that eligible persons can obtain citizenship papers without any hassle
President Bidhya Devi Bhandari issued an ordinance to amend the Nepal Citizenship Act on May 23 so as to enable two categories of people – children born to citizens by birth and children of Nepali mothers whose fathers cannot be traced – to obtain Nepali Citizenship Certificates from the district administration offices (DAOs) without bureaucratic hassles. As per the Ministry of Home Affairs, there are a total of 190,726 individuals who have acquired Nepali Citizenship Certificates by birth before the promulgation of the new constitution in 2015. It is estimated that around 500,000 children of the citizens by birth will be eligible for the certificate by descent as per the constitutional provision, based on which the ordinance has been issued to facilitate them to obtain the certificate. Similarly, an estimated 680,533 children born to Nepali mothers whose fathers are not known will also be eligible for the citizenship by descent following the issuance of the ordinance and an amendment to the Citizenship Rules on May 31. The children born to single mothers will be able to obtain Nepali Citizenship Certificates in the mother's name, without requiring them to identify the father's name on paper.
At an interaction held on Wednesday, legal experts, however, warned of procedural challenges the children of both the categories are likely to face at the time of obtaining the citizenship paper as the children of these groups are required to produce birth certificates from hospitals or birth registration certificate from the local levels, which were refusing to issue the birth registration certificate to the children only on the basis of mother's nationality.
Previous Citizenship Rules did not make it mandatory for the applicants to submit birth registration certificates. As per the ordinance, details about the reason behind not mentioning the name of the father are maintained in the administration office's record book, not on the citizenship paper used in daily life.
If the ordinance is implemented sincerely, around 1 million children born to both the categories will be able to obtain the citizenship paper. The government decided to issue the ordinance to facilitate them to obtain the necessary paper, without which they had been deprived of pursing a higher education or doing other personal business from opening a bank account to purchasing a piece of land. They were, in a sense, stateless within the state due to lack of citizenship papers. This problem should have been resolved within three years from the date of commencement of the new constitution as per the constitution provision, which has stated that all laws that contradict the new constitution will be amended within the given deadline. But the political parties in the Federal Parliament could not reach a deal on some key issues on citizenship, and these types of people were deprived of their fundamental rights. As the ordinance on citizenship has addressed the pressing problem, the local levels and DAOs should comply with the new provision, and the eligible persons should not be compelled to run from pillar to post to get their citizenship papers. But the effectiveness of the ordinance will cease to exist after six months of its issuance unless it is replaced by a new bill.
Revise textbooks
The directive of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to the concerned authorities the other day to seize all school textbooks failing to incorporate the new map of Nepal should be carried out rigidly. The government had issued a new map incorporating the disputed areas of Lipulekh, Kalapani and Limpiyadhura last year, which was later endorsed by the House of Representatives. Therefore, it is only right that publishers revise the textbooks, especially those related to Social Studies and general knowledge. Schools that continue to prescribe books without the required changes should be penalised.
Parents also have the moral obligation to remind the schools should they defy the government directive.
The map apart, the ministry must also look for other inaccuracies and omissions in other textbooks.
Quite a few textbooks published by the private sector contain many factual oversights, not to mention tons of grammar mistakes. Thus, it would be interest of the ministry to approve textbooks only when they meet the set standards. It would be even better if a government entity took the responsibility of publishing a single set of textbooks in both Nepali and English for all the schools.
A version of this article appears in the print on June 11, 2021, of The Himalayan Times.
