Nepal’s Sukumbasi (landless and squatters) question is commonly portrayed as a dispute over public land. In Kathmandu and a few other cities, it periodically emerges as the illegal occupation of riverbanks, floodplains, and other public lands. Efforts to clear these settlements are often criticized as "dozer terror," raising concerns about the abuse of governmental authority and violations of human rights. In the Tarai, the issue is associated with forest encroachment, unplanned settlements, and disputed land ownership. In the mid-hills, it is reflected in the erosion of agrarian livelihoods and the gradual migration of families to towns, often triggered when younger family members leave the country for foreign employment. These seemingly disparate manifestations, however, obscure the underlying reality: landlessness is no longer simply an agrarian issue. It has become a central challenge of Nepal’s urban transition and a critical question for the country’s social and economic development.
The above distinction is important. A country can treat the landless either as encroachers to be managed or removed, or as citizens whose circumstances reveal failures in the urban system. The first approach leads to episodic evictions, political bargaining, and legal ambiguity. The second approach asks why families occupy floodplains, river corridors, unstable slopes, forest margins, roadside strips, and vacant public land. It asks why the formal land,and housing market fails to accommodate workers who build, clean, transport goods, cook, sell, repair, and provide essential services to the city. It also asks why the government expanded municipalities without providing serviced land, affordable housing, or secure tenure for low-income households.
Nepal has already become a majority urban nation based on its own classification of what is urban. The 2021 national census stated that about two-thirds of the population lived in urban municipalities(National Statistics Office, 2023), although the stage and state of urbanization vary widely across locations. UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report 2022 states that urbanization remains a twenty-first-century megatrend and projects that the world’s urban share will rise from 56 percent in 2021 to 68 percent by 2050, with Asia and Africa absorbing most of the future urban growth (UN-Habitat, 2022).
The historical roots of the Sukumbasi (landless and squatter) settlements in Nepal run much deeper than recent urban encroachment issues. The problem reflects a long history of agrarian inequality, social exclusion, and discontinuity in state policies. Landlessness was once concealed within systems of economic dependency, bonded labor, tenancy, servitude, and caste hierarchy. Later, as slavery and bonded labor were legally abolished, the land-poor became more visible as a distinct social category. The state responded through settlement programs, resettlement initiatives, land distribution policies, cadastral surveys, and statutory classifications. Yet the problem remains largely unresolved.
Informal settlements in cities are not random, but are usually located where land is available, transport is accessible, work is near, rent is low or absent, and the state is unsure how to enforce land rules. Riverbanks, vacant public lands, and public corridors are attractive not because the poor prefer hazard, but because the formal city system excludes this group.
Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Urban Development in Nepal
Squatter settlements and slums in the Kathmandu Valley illustrate this contradiction sharply. The Kathmandu Valley is Nepal’s most urbanized region, its administrative core, and has the largest concentration of service-sector opportunities. It also boasts some of the highest land prices in the country. The poor who migrate to Kathmandu are not outside the urban economy; they are embedded in it, support it, and enable its economic functions to thrive. They work in construction, transport, retail, street vending, domestic service, recycling, repair, security, food services, and informal manufacturing. UN-Habitat emphasizes that cities cannot build inclusive futures by excluding informal workers. The report calls for legal recognition, access to essential services, social and economic rights, finance, markets, and representation in policymaking for informal workers (UN-Habitat, 2022). A settlement policy that ignores livelihoods will fail because it separates housing from the very economic reasons people moved to the city.
Nepal’s constitutional framework already requires the government to move beyond viewing eviction as the only solution. Article 37 recognizes the right to adequate housing and protects citizens from eviction except in accordance with the law. Article 40 requires the state to provide land to landless Dalits and settlement opportunities for homeless Dalit families. Article 42 recognizes the social justice claims of marginalized, indigent, and displaced groups (Constitution of Nepal, 2015). These provisions do not mean that every occupation of public land must be regularized in place. They do, however, mean that settlement policy cannot be reduced to policing, eviction, and clean-up. Due process, verification, alternative resettlement options, access to basic services, and social safeguards are constitutional obligations, not acts of charity. Similarly, Amnesty International has urged Nepal to end forced evictions, ensure due process, and empower the Land Commission to identify landless squatters and unmanaged dwellers and, where appropriate, provide them with secure land ownership (Amnesty International, 2025).While the fraudulent squatters need to be identified and legally evicted, the genuine landless and homeless families must be protected from broad-brush evictions.
A serious solution to this problem must begin by separating three questions that are often conflated. First, who is genuinely landless and homeless, who belongs to a land-poor or housing-poor household, and who is a politically connected opportunist? Second, which sites can be safely upgraded in place, which require redesign, and which are unsafe because of flood risk, river ecology, slope instability, or public infrastructure needs? Third, what combination of tenure (ownership or rental opportunities), housing finance, and livelihood support can make relocation or upgrading sustainable? Nepal's past Sukumbasi commissions have often conflated these questions. The result has been nominal verification, weak spatial planning, and inconsistent delivery of services and benefits.
A better alternative is to base the solution on a localized land-use intelligence system linked to a permanent settlement institution. It should include a continuously updated database integrating cadastral records, public land inventories, hazard maps, service nodes, infrastructure corridors, and beneficiary verification at the ward and municipal levels. Such a system would enable Kathmandu Metropolitan City, adjacent municipalities, provincial authorities, and federal agencies to classify every informal settlement according to risk, tenure status, service access, and livelihood opportunities. It would also allow the state to distinguish among in-situ upgrading, land readjustment, serviced relocation, and provision of affordable rental housing.
A single standard solution will not work for Kathmandu. Riverbank settlements in high-risk corridors may require relocation combined with ecological restoration, floodplain protection, and the provision of alternative housing. Settlements on serviceable public land may be upgraded through compact design, secure occupancy rights, and the provision of drainage, water, sanitation, solid waste management, and emergency vehicle access. Tenants living in informal rental rooms may need rental regulation and municipal housing assistance rather than land titles. Peripheral municipalities may require land pooling and inclusionary zoning so that any urban expansion reserves a portion of serviced land for low-income households. Secondary towns outside the Valley may need planned growth centers that reduce migration pressure on Kathmandu by bringing employment, schools, health services, and markets closer to where people live.
The concept of smart settlements becomes useful to solve these problems. A smart settlement in Nepal should be a safe, compact, serviced, and livelihood-linked community that offers residents a good quality of life. It should be connected to roads and public transportation; equipped with reliable water and sanitation services; designed to be walkable; and linked to at least two sources of income, such as wage employment, small enterprises, urban agriculture, recycling, food processing, crafts, or services. Digital tools such as GIS (Geographic Information System), QGIS (Quantum GIS), mobile surveys, and public beneficiary databases can support transparency, but the core is not technology. The core is the intelligent management of land, services, tenure, and livelihoods.
Kathmandu's landlessness and homelessness problem requires a regional perspective. The Valley is not a single municipality but a functional urban region spanning multiple local governments. It is also an integrated ecological system. Housing markets, labor markets, rivers, transportation corridors, environmental pollution, and waste management systems all cross municipal boundaries. If one municipality evicts squatters while another is forced to receive displaced households, the problem merely shifts jurisdiction. A new Kathmandu Valley Settlement Authority should bring together federal land institutions, provincial agencies, metropolitan and municipal governments, river basin authorities, transportation planners, human rights bodies, and community representatives under a single coordinating entity. Its first task should be to prepare a publicly accessible, settlement-by-settlement atlas showing who lives where, what risks they face, and what livelihood opportunities are available.
The land and housing financing model must also change. Nepal's landlessness-related policies have too often depended on discretionary budgets and temporary commission cycles. Urban settlement programs should instead be financed through a combination of federal grants, municipal infrastructure budgets, land value capture, cross-subsidies from land pooling, concessional housing loans, cooperative savings, climate adaptation funds, and private-sector participation under strong social safeguards. UN-Habitat's New Urban Agenda emphasizes compact, safe, healthy, and resilient settlements, placing water, sanitation, mobility, and climate adaptation at the center (UN-Habitat, 2022). For Kathmandu, this means that upgrading Sukumbasi settlements should be viewed as an investment in human capital, flood management, public health, labor productivity, and climate resilience rather than merely as welfare spending.
Opponents may argue that regularization of squatter settlements can encourage further encroachment. That risk is real, but it is not an argument for inaction. Rather, it is an argument for credible rules. A rights-based urban approach should include a clearly defined cut-off date, biometric or documentary verification, public hearings, grievance mechanisms, exclusion of fraudulent claimants, restrictions on resale for a specified period, joint titling for spouses where titles are granted, and transparent disclosure of beneficiary lists. It should also make future encroachment more difficult by updating land and housing-related laws, creating a visible pipeline of affordable housing options while protecting rivers, forests, and public spaces through clear mapping and effective enforcement. The difference is that enforcement should follow planning, not be a substitute for it.
The political temptation is to promise the rapid provision of land or housing to landless and homeless families. The administrative temptation is to postpone action until perfect data become available. Both approaches miss the point. Kathmandu needs a phased strategy of planning and implementation. Phase one should map and classify all informal settlements according to hazard exposure, tenure status, and service conditions. Phase two should begin immediate humanitarian upgrading wherever residents can safely remain after the provision of water, toilets, drainage, fire access, waste collection, school access,and health outreach. Phase three should implement relocation only where an independent hazard assessment demonstrates that continued habitation is unsafe or incompatible with critical public infrastructure. Phase four should establish permanent low-income housing programs, including serviced plots, cooperative housing, rental housing, income-based rental subsidies, land pooling quotas, and planned growth centers in secondary towns. Phase five should maintain all records in a permanent national-to-local land and housing database so that each change in government does not require restarting the entire process.
While Nepal's future is clearly urban, the question is whether that future will be built through selective beautification projects for the affluent or through inclusive city-making. River corridors can be restored without making children homeless. Public land can be protected without denying the constitutional rights of the poor. Informal workers can be regulated without being harassed. Urban growth can be compact without being exclusionary. Properly understood, the Sukumbasi question is therefore not a marginal issue at the edge of the city. It is a test of whether Nepal can urbanize democratically while creating smart, just, and inclusive settlements.
A durable solution will not come from yet another temporary commission. It will come from a permanent settlement strategy that combines verified rights, spatial intelligence, municipal planning, climate resilience, and livelihood opportunities. Kathmandu should lead this transition for urban areas across the country. If it does, the city can move beyond eviction-based responses toward inclusive urbanism. If it does not, landlessness and homelessness will continue to reappear wherever the state fails to make room for the people who sustain the city.
Keshav Bhattarai, PhD, is Professor of Geography at the University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO, USA. Ambika P. Adhikari, DDes, is a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Integrated Development Studies (IIDS), Kathmandu, Nepal, and Urban Futures Scholar at Arizona State University, AZ, USA.
