Who are squatters?

Huge informal settlements are a rather new phenomenon in Kathmandu and the urban areas of Nepal in general. These settlements are mostly populated by rural immigrants and started to develop during the abrupt spurt of urbanization in the 1990s with a growth rate even twice as fast as the average urban growth rate of Kathmandu and at present make up two percent of its population (Sengupta, 2011; Shrestha & Shrestha, 2020). The main cause for people to move into informal settlements, often straight on arrival from their rural origin, are the growing housing affordability problems, due to the shortage of land, the rising urban poverty and the insufficient housing infrastructure (Sengupta, 2011).

While the term “Slum” refers foremost to the poor living conditions of a settlement, the term “squatting” is used to describe the legal status of people residing on land or in buildings they are not formally entitled to inhabit. Although the living conditions of the people inhabiting the informal settlements of Kathmandu’s riverbanks are varying, they can be described as slum dwellers, but since the focus of this report rests foremost on the political struggles around the Bagmati river, we make use of the concept and term of squatting. The Nepali term for squatters is “sukumbasi”, originally used in rural contexts to describe people without legal ownership of land and adapted to name the inhabitants as well of the urban informal settlements. Some of these people reject this term, since they try to claim tenure rights for the land they are inhabiting and describe themselves as “swabasi” – dwellers staying by themselves, to emphasize the agency as well as the burden of their situation (Brooks, 2016). However, the idea prevails that the people in squatter settlements of Kathmandu Valley aren’t ‘genuine sukumbasi’ since they own land in their home districts. This idea has resulted in the term “hukumbasi” meaning ‘people who rule over the land they inhabit’ (Shrestha, Poudel and Khatri, 2020). Thus, this term delegitimizes the demands of the squatters to be relocated and heightens suspicion about them, causing distrust and conflict (Shrestha, Poudel and Khatri, 2020).

Fig: BEFORE: Balkhu squatter settlement (Source: Google earth) Fig: AFTER: Balkhu squatter settlement (Source: Google earth)