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Nepal, the world's second most water‐rich country, nevertheless struggles to provide sufficient domestic electricity. Despite Nepal's potential to become the hydropower source for South Asia, it still relies heavily on importing electricity from India. This paper investigates why Nepal's hydropower capacity is inadequately utilized from both domestic and international perspectives and finds that domestic factors such as geo‐climate features, weak infrastructure, political instability, and institutional deficiencies significantly hinder Nepal's hydropower development. From an international perspective, Nepal's geopolitical bonds and energy dependency with India and the regional power‐sharing configuration have significantly influenced its hydropower policy‐making. Furthermore, this paper proposes how Nepal could sustainably develop its hydropower for self‐sufficiency by establishing better policy instruments, attracting foreign investments, and upgrading its electricity infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates India's potential role as a linguistic epicentre for Nepal by conducting a short‐term diachronic follow‐up study of Bernaisch and Lange (2012) that is based on the South Asian Varieties of English corpus. Based on the recently updated version of the corpus with similar data from a decade later, a potential spread of the presentational itself construction with an adverbial focus, which has allegedly spread in Nepal originating in Indian English, is investigated. Also, possible instances of invariant use of itself, that are frequently used in Indian English, will be scrutinized. While findings indeed show an increase of the adverbial focus construction, supporting India's role as an epicentre for the region, only one invariant use of the feature can be documented in Nepali English, which can tentatively be interpreted as a selection process that might be at play in the acceptance and spread of certain epicentrally induced features over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do farmers' collectives, which pool land, labour, capital, and skills to create medium‐sized production units, offer a more viable model of farming for resource‐constrained smallholders than individual family farms? A participatory action research project in Eastern India and Nepal provides notable answers. Groups of marginal and tenant farmers, catalysed by the project, evolved into four different collective models with varying levels of cooperation, gender composition, and land ownership/tenancy status. Based on 3 years of action research, this paper examines how the models evolved and their differential outcomes. All groups have gained from cultivating contiguous plots in their efficiency of labour and machine use for land preparation and irrigation, and from economies in input purchase. Several collectives of tenant farmers have also enhanced their bargaining power vis‐a‐vis an entrenched landlord class and thus been able to negotiate lower rents and refuse long‐standing feudal obligations. However, the models differ in their extent of economic gain and their ability to handle gender inequalities and conflicts over labour sharing. The paper explores the historical, regional, and cultural factors that could explain such differences across the models. It thus offers unique insights into the processes, benefits, and challenges of farmers' collectives and provides pointers for replication and further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is not a history of cartography but focuses on the interlinkages between British rulers and decisions for shaping inadvertent borderlands, through imperial supremacy and spatial knowledge. In this sense, the paper fills in a gap in the geographical history of India's unique borderland that holds a useful key to "cultural" and "geopolitical understandings" of south Asia and its impressions on modern Indo‐Nepal ties. The theme of the study is to analyze the chronological decisions and rationale of "historical faults" in the implementation by a colonial power in marshalling all available resources in surveying, mapping, and demarcating India's only open border as the ever‐shifting "turbulent frontier" that attracted imperial concern for peace and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]