Apropos of the news story “Uneven distribution of population a challenge” (THT, November 22, Page 2), it would perhaps take someone like late king Mahendra to work out balanced distribution of population through programmes such as ‘go back to village campaign’.

We are an out and out federal nation now with individual identities and this uneven distribution should not have come about. It is an irony that when we had centralized political system people were not so keen on pouring into Kathmandu and other urban centres. But no sooner the country went federal, everybody started migrating to the urban centres leaving behind their individual paradises.

Now that there are local governments people should have been proud to return and remain in their places of origin and birth. Everybody wants to move to Kathmandu. I caught up with two brothers from Jhapa at a car wash centre yesterday.

They told me that no amount of federalism will force them to return to Jhapa where they still have 5/6 bighas of land, now totally neglected and fallow. They said the place is too hot for comfort. And they would rather live in Kathmandu with plenty of dust, traffic grids, toxic food, no water etc rather than return to the ‘furnace’.

It seems the state will have hard time in transferring the public servants, too to their Pradesh governments after the election unless politicians lead by example.

In the US the former presidents, the Bush father and son, returned to Texas after completion of their terms. But our first president does not want to go and live at his home town which is only 20 minutes away by flight. He wants to live in Kathmandu even after the public eviction notice by his landlord.

Manohar Shrestha, Kathmandu

Hen’s teeth

I am writing this in reference to the article “Food security” (THT, November 22 Page 8).

It is meticulously written article which I enjoyed reading. The writer entails the very notion as to why food security concern is ensuing from what might be seen from the growing undernourishment in Bhutan.

Whatever we do in our life, food is the engine of our life cycle. Everyone needs food to survive though we pay least attention to what takes us value the agriculture in Nepal. By definition we know our country is an agricultural country. We have been studying his from our childhood in our school text book. However, what is happening, ironically, is that we need to import more than 85% of food products from India. This doesn’t make us to feel we are an agricultural country.

There are very important things that we need to inculcate in our mind that sans technology making our country agriculturally self-reliant sounds like finding hen’s teeth. We need to take pride in what we do. We proudly do say our country is an agricultural country but we hesitate to do agriculture in our fields.

We rather buy foods from the markets by ignoring our arable lands in our locality.

Recently, I have written Falang Food dictionary, the aim of my food dictionary is to illustrate the nutritional and other informative meanings of various food products and its value to our life.

Shiva Neupane, Melbourne